Okay. Let's get started, shall we? Welcome, everyone. It's great to see you here at USIP on this cold and grey day. Thank you all for making the trek to be here. Over in Karachi, on the other hand, where much of Pakistan's media is based, it is a positively balmy 77 degrees. And it was in Karachi just one week ago that yet another attack was made on journalists. Three employees of the Express Media Group were gunned down and another injured. So Pakistan remains one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, which is just one of the many pressures that shape Pakistan media reporting of conflict and politics. I'm Sheldon Himmelfarb and I manage our PeaceTech initiative here at USIP where we work at this nexus of media technology and data in an effort to tackle the challenges of conflict management and peace building. And we are really honored to have a wonderful panel here who are going to take you inside many of the other pressures on Pakistan media. We're all familiar with that critique of sensationalism in the Pakistan media and the concerns that the race for ratings is one of the things fanning the flames of intolerance. But in each of the presentations today, I think we're going to get well beyond that simple or simplistic critique. And we are really happy to have our friends from BBC Media Action with us and we're looking forward to diving into their latest insights into Pakistan. Their report focuses on regional vernacular media and on social media which adds depth and complexity and should prompt new thinking about the media's potential for fostering inclusive dialogue and participation of diverse voices in Pakistan's political debates. And both of the authors, Huma Yusuf, who is here with us today and Emery Shoemaker, are all both friends of USIP who have worked with USIP on research papers and media assessment methodologies, so welcome back to USIP, Huma. Here at USIP we are coming to the end of a detailed research project on Pakistan media reporting of violence using a combination of audience research, media interviews, and extensive content analysis. We are ground-truthing some of those claims that I referred to earlier that are made about the Pakistan media. And USIP is deeply committed to the idea that change must originate with local media organizations and citizens. So importantly, we are about to go to the Pakistan media organizations themselves with our research, talk about this research, and put them in the driver's seat about what should be done with this. It's also intended to assist media policy and program design, and we need to be thinking about how our priorities and our methods should change to assist Pakistan media organizations to help them achieve their goals. And Michael Dwyer, who's on the panel here, has been leading this important work at USIP. It's a busy and exciting time for us here in what we call our P-STEC initiative. Earlier today, some of you were here, I noticed some of you were here this morning. We launched our media assessment of the media in Myanmar, and we've also this week published the third of our blogs and bullets research on the role of social media in the Syrian conflict. So all of those reports are out there on the desk outside, and I would really urge you to take a look at them if you're interested in this nexus between media and conflict. I'm going to hand over the podium in a minute to Moe to say a few words, but I should also say it's a great pleasure to welcome Pam Constable back to USIP to moderate this discussion. Let's see here Pam. To respond to the presentations and to generally challenge all of you to be a very active audience. Her two books on Pakistan are must reads, so you can be sure that our panelists know that they're not going to be getting away with any loose talk today. Pam is our moderator. Speaking of loose talk, last thing, housekeeping, please set your phones on stun mode, or we'll have to ask our friends in the NSA to do it for you. So welcome everyone, I'm really pleased that you're here. Let me turn it over to Moe to say some introductory words as well. Thanks. Welcome everyone to USIP and to this event. My job is to do what I hear people do at these events, and then I say why did this person have to do this? You already know it. So I'm here to welcome you and thank you for being here. Sheldon has said much of what I wanted to. I am Moid Yusuf. I had the South Asia program here at USIP. I just want to quickly run you through what we do and then hand it over to Pam to do what we're really here for. The South Asia program traditionally has been focused mostly on Pakistan. That's been our biggest program in the South Asia center. And Afghanistan and Central Asia part of our South and Central Asia division. In Pakistan we do both research and analysis and also programmatic work with civil society through our own expertise in USIP and our grant making program which works with local partners and civil society on the ground. To affect two things. One, to inform better policy making through our research and analysis and improve the credibility of the Pakistani state. And second, specifically to work on increasing tolerance of diversity in Pakistan. And these are the two areas that we see USIP have a niche in but also the two drivers of conflict which I think are often not understood well in Pakistan. So that's where most of our work is focused. Media is an essential component of that and Sheldon and his team do a fantastic job. I wouldn't steal Michael's thunder who will tell you about the research work that we've done over the past year. But in addition to research we also work in the messaging space through the media through social and electronic and print media to try and reduce the space for violence which is often generated through these messages and media is a part of that to increase the social taboo on violence and to increase the incentives for peaceful behavior. And so research and this messaging come together to make our media work important in Pakistan. Finally just quickly Sheldon mentioned Huma has published reports for us in the past. Her report on Karachi, the conflict dynamics in Karachi you'll find outside and it's definitely a must read given what we hear about Karachi every day. It really gets into the nuts and bolts of what is going on there. Her report is part of our broader project on conflict mapping of Pakistan. And what we do is we go to the sub-national level whether it's provincial, ethnic, communal, geographic, et cetera and look at various dynamics of conflict across themes, across geography in Pakistan. And their media again fits in crucially and the topic that Huma is going to talk about today because we are now moving from an understanding of Pakistan at the national level which we do all the time looking at English media, English language, press and media to regional and sub-regional outlets of print and electronic media which really I think influence Pakistan much more than the national level that we consume here in Washington and others. So I look forward to hearing this and Pam it's over to you. Thank you. Can you all hear me more or less? It's a small room so we should be okay. Delighted to have you all here and especially happy to see Huma who I got to know when we were both fellow fellows at the Wilson Center. I was working on my most recent Pakistan book and she was working on some of her projects so we became good friends and it's glad to see her here and to read this report which is really excellent. Happy to meet Michael after some phone conversations, meet you in person. I'm just going to make a couple of brief points before turning it over to Huma and her report and then hopefully afterwards we'll have a lively discussion, feel free to make comments, critiques as well as questions we really would like to have a provocative and thoughtful exchange. When I was coming here today I was thinking that the first time I worked in Pakistan which was in 1998 there was basically almost no media at all. It basically consisted of Pakistan State Television which basically consisted of cricket matches and propaganda videos about atrocities in Kashmir. That's pretty much all you could see. So too little. Now of course we've gone the other extreme. Too much. Too many voices. Too many competing channels. It's really become a tower of babble in some ways. But I certainly, I think all of us would agree that's much better than the alternative. And yet we also know that Pakistan media is very much a work in progress. It's both fledgling and deeply flawed, as Huma has said and pointed out in the report. It does much that is extremely positive for the society, opening up access to new voices in many languages. I noticed that I think in rural areas there's even higher coverage of social media and cell phones than there is even in urban areas. You can now reach village elders on a cell phone. People are now tweeting from the most remote parts of Pakistan. So there's now this proliferation of communication that was never there before in a very short time. Really a decade and really even, it's really been the last half decade that this really has begun to snowball with all the good and all the bad. Part of the problem is that as with any newly developing media, especially in a country as complicated as Pakistan where you have very strong military intelligence institutions and where you have a violent conflict going on, there's always a question of how far to go. How far can you go in a country like Pakistan? What can you criticize? What can't you criticize? Whom do you have to fear? Whom do you have to worry offending? And if we just take the most obvious one to begin with, the Army and its related agencies, it's very easy to criticize but only up to a point. I'll just use a wonderful quote here in the latest melodrama about Musharraf and Woody or wouldn't he be going on trial? There was lots of wonderful commentary about would the military establishment allow him to go on trial. And there's this wonderful quote that I use in a story from this wonderful lawyer and columnist, Babar Satar, who said that basically the effort to prevent him from going on trial was as follows. This is about bravado, hubris and impunity touted as professional honor and a spree to core. The safe exit option for Musharraf is not meant to guard against a general being punished but to preempt the ghastly precedent and ignominy of a general being tried in civilian court. It's a lovely quote, very glib, very articulate, but it's only a comment. It's not about facts. When you start getting into facts, when you start delving into things that the military holds sacred, it's perquisite, it's property, it's power, you can get in very serious trouble as Salim Shazad did, got killed for investigating abuses within the Navy. So there's lots of room for chit chat and there's lots of room for sarcasm and lots of room for opinion but there's still a very, very dangerous ground when you try to get at the facts. So that's one problem with the national security state and a free media as a combination. The other problem is something, another problem is something that I would call sort of a combination of the lack of professionalism and this incredibly strong tendency to criticize and be ad hominin. Both the print media and television especially have become shouting matches in which people say almost anything and so it debases the entire discourse. When you go on these evening talk shows which are incredibly competitive, there's many, many of them, as we said before, competing for ratings. So the prize goes to the shrillest voice, not to the most articulate or thoughtful commentator and people do say the most outrageous things, which is fine if you're in a country of people that are highly educated and informed and have access to multiple sources of information. When you're dealing with a relatively new audience in a country with a fairly high illiteracy rate and where people have really been brought up to defer to those in authority rather than to express their own opinions. This idea of saying whatever comes into your head can have a very negative influence and people get very confused and people get very strongly conflicting signals from the opinion makers among them and therefore I think that there has been a lack of responsibility on the part of people whose opinions do carry weight. I'm afraid too often they're not expressing ideas that are, I guess the word really is responsible enough and are really just sort of venting. And the other thing is that very often you find that public media, television especially and now we have social media which is a slightly different topic, is really used to present what I'm trying to say here. Points of view that are more than irresponsible. There is a great deal of appeasement of religious groups and very conservative religious movements. It's partly out of fear and I think it's partly out of affinity which is something that I wrote about in my recent book which I think is a very dangerous combination of the growth of ultranationalism, anti-Westernism, sectarianism and the appeal of fundamentalism, not just the danger of suicide bombing but the appeal of fundamentalist thought and the appeal of this notion of a moral crusade against the modern westernized vulgar society that many religious groups warn against. We've all spent a lot of time in Pakistan and we know that it's very appealing to many Pakistanis when they hear the west is out to destroy us and out to destroy Islam and 9-11 was a fraud and you still hear this today in Pakistan. It's very easy for Pakistanis to connect the dots whether we think they're true dots or not. When you have radical mullahs standing up on the radio, in pulpits, on television, in social media they sang the most outrageous things including 9-11 was a plot by the Mossad and the CIA. This kind of thing that gets repeated over and over again, drone campaigns, we're our own worst enemy frankly in the drone campaign because we fulfill every Pakistanis worst fear. So there are reasons that Pakistanis in many cases are drawn to these kinds of arguments. My point is that in a country with so much conflict, so much confusion, so many conflicting messages and so much danger it's really incumbent on professionals in the media to be thoughtful, to be responsible and to be as accurate as possible and for many reasons which we will be getting into later on, this is not always what's happening. So I'm just going to stop there with a few thoughts and I'm at home, please feel free to talk as long as you want and then we'll have a good discussion after that. Okay, thanks BAM, thank you everyone for coming. The way that BAM has spoken about Pakistan's media, the challenges of non-professional industry facing a lot of pressures, you know, promoting narratives that are problematic in the outside Pakistan and in the English language press for example within Pakistan you'll see a lot of frothing at the mouth about sort of the irresponsible political talk shows and the sort of messages that they're putting out and the model narratives that they're promoting but within Pakistan there's also a separate conversation happening about the media in Pakistan and it is a more positive story and it looks at the fact that there is this slow shift towards democracy becoming just a little bit more entrenched in Pakistan. So you'll see this, there's this narrative of this democratic transition which comes starting largely with the elections last year which were historic in many ways and then going on to the fact that at the same time the Pakistan army has been sort of reiterating the fact that it would like to withdraw from the political space that it won't be interfering in politics. Local government elections are underway in Pakistan, we've already had them in Balochistan they're scheduled to happen in the other provinces in coming months and for the first time in Pakistani history these elections, sorry the local government elections are taking place on a party-wise basis under a democratic elected government so that's, you know, progress I'd say. And when this conversation about Pakistan's democratic transition happens you also get people pointing to the fact that the judiciary is more independent than it's ever been before and that might bring with it sort of other pitfalls in terms of it being more activist in the way that it engages with Pakistan's political dynamics but then the other thing that's always cited is this free media and there really is a sense that there is something really inherently democratizing about the kokafdi that the media is offering. And so one of the things we set out to do with this BBC report was to start really drilling this question like what role is this the Pakistani media playing in the democratic transition and to clarify here what I mean by Pakistani media I'll be using that term what I'm referring to is privately owned commercial television media for the most part but also radio stations, the internet and the wide access to mobile phones and I'll get into some statistics in a minute. And one of the things that we realized was that there's all this talk level talk about the media in Pakistan but we don't really know how it's being received on the other end. So the BBC media action report tried to get the audience perspective on the democratic transition and was able for the first time to do focus group research in rural and urban areas to talk more on this point. And the narrative that we heard from the people is different than the narrative you hear in context like this. So when we now talk about Pakistani media and its role in Pakistan's democratic transition there is this sense of several new actors and state institutions the army and judiciary, the civilian government and then the media as an actor as well involved in this new institutional tussle and sort of renegotiating of Pakistan's historic political dynamic or bargain as it were and we talk in the sort of top level way but what you hear from the ground up is actually mostly positive news there's this sense that the media has been a huge player in terms of helping for the first time in an unprecedented way allowing people to engage in the conversation. And I'll just talk a little bit about some of what we heard. There is this sense that there is a new ability for people to articulate their public demand and to be heard in the corridors of power. There was this sense in all the focus group discussions that we got transcripts for that the media is playing a positive role, people feel more empowered because they feel that if the media hears their problems then someone in power who can do something about their problems is hearing about them as well. People were especially happy about the fact that there has been this proliferation of regional language media. So just to set the stage a little bit, Pakistan has 90 privately owned television channels and this is following a period of media liberalization in 2002 and before that as Pan has already mentioned and the broadcast sector there was only state-owned radio and TV. We also have 115 FM radio stations around the country. Mobile phone penetration is at 70%, probably a little bit higher and internet access is available to between 20 and 30 million people we don't have exact stats yet. The most of the media that we talk about is the Urdu language national media channels that broadcast across the country. But the ones that got the highest sort of support and who generated the most amount of excitement amongst the focus group participants were the regional language channels and these are channels that broadcast regional languages such as Sindhi, Balochee, Punjabi, Seraiki and are much more concerned with local level issues. So they are looking at crop prices and rural parts of the country. They're looking at road construction projects, local transport issues, market unions, things like that, really local level issues and they are speaking in their own languages to each other. Some of the examples that we've seen are for example Sindhi language television channels which are amongst the most feisty and professional and have some of the highest ratings in the country and in addition to doing sort of local programming they're also advocating for the Sindh province to push against the construction of the Kalabagh Dam which is a dam that would probably give more water to Kheber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab but probably according to the Sindhi perspective deprived their province of water. So you see sort of a sustained new narrative about the Kalabagh Dam coming up in the Sindhi language media which is very different from the one that's happening in the national media. And amongst the focus group discussions there was the sense that the regional language channels hear us, they know our problems even better than the national media, they know what really concerns us. It's not just politics, it's more about our local everyday concerns and they had a sense that the media was helping them approach their own political representatives in a more meaningful way so that members of the provincial assembly and other district commissioners and things were watching these channels and actually responding quite effectively. But the other thing was this feeling that there is finally some space for our voice in the national conversation. And as Pam described, when you had a state media there was some one top-down version of events in the Urdu language from broadcast from Islamabad and now you have the ability to actually speak. Now what's interesting of course is that this ability to speak is being used by groups that are aggressively pushed out of the national mainstream media narrative on a fairly consistent basis. I've given you the example of the Sindhis being able to talk, have a different conversation about the Kalabagh Dam. The other thing that we've seen is among Sariqi speakers who live in Northern Sindh and Southern Punjab the local media really pushed and generated momentum around call for a new province in Southern Punjab for Sariqi speakers. And there is this sense amongst the Sariqi speaking population at the momentum that has now built around the idea of granting, carving out a new province has come out of the fact that there was a new platform that people could start articulating and just demand that. And there has been some sort of institutional progress towards thinking about how to make a new province in the area. But you also see this happening not just in regional language television channels and regional language newspapers but of course on social media which I'll touch on just briefly here. And what's happening is that social media is offering an opportunity for people who are being really pushed out of the sort of national conversations certainly but also this regional level conversation. People who don't have a way to participate at all in the public debate, they are turning to social media and finding a way to get their voice heard. And the best example of this of course is the Baloch separatists who are based in the western province of Balochistan where there's been a low level insurgency since 2006 and where the Pakistan army is accused of rampant human rights violations of sort of trying to crush the separatist movement and certainly keep the Baloch separatist voices and point of view out of the national narrative for decades now, not just the last few years. And Baloch separatists have become very savvy. They have blogs, they have Twitter feeds and they do keep documenting human rights violations and other problems that they are facing on social media. And the way that this works is that it gets picked up by the international community. The international media sees that and starts writing about it and in this strange interesting loop of events then the international Udu language mainstream media that could never engage with these issues is now forced to confront them. And even if it doesn't directly cover them it has to acknowledge that the international media just said something and that there is this Baloch point of view that has trickled out into the world. So you do see these kinds of significant changes happening and the sense that we got from focus group discussions is that for the most part they think of this as really exciting and positive and they finally feel that these two are one of the actors in this historic institutional tussle that Pakistan has that it's not just about top level players like the army and the government but also now the people who can speak to power. Now of course this is where it gets interesting. Not everything about the public's growing role in this national conversation is smooth or easy. For one of the main problems of course is that there is growing public disillusionment with state institutions. There is this sense that we are complaining. You can hear what our problems are. We do it fairly consistently on the airwaves, on Twitter. Why isn't anything being done about this? And so one of the things we also heard from our audience research was this growing sense of frustration and disillusionment that there is no longer any secret about what the issues and challenges in Pakistan are so why isn't there more responsiveness? And I do think that this lack of responsiveness or impact which results of course from larger issues of governance and we can talk about that later that this could be seen to actually drive cycles of public grievance and actually fuel instability. For example, and this is just a banal example that happens in small second-tier Pakistani cities every day is enough media coverage of a power outage will eventually lead to a small power riot. So just on this mini-scale you're trying to see how this can be problematic. The other issue is the fact that Pakistan sort of top-down narrative of social cohesion, religious cohesion that has long dominated Pakistan's public space is being challenged. There's suddenly this necessity of recognizing the ideological, ethnic, linguistic, religious heterogeneity that is Pakistani culture and the population at large, of course. And there is concerns now that this decentralized media, this Tower of Babel as Pam put it is actually going to fuel conflict. So the things that I talked about that we can frame in a positive light in terms of inclusion, democratic representation, et cetera can also fuel fragmentation and sort of greater splintering. So Balot Separatist getting a larger voice is a threat to the Pakistani Federation and the opinion of many people. Similarly, increasing resentments between provinces as regional language channels highlight the different issues and sort of pit one provinces problems against the other and make it a competitive conversation rather than a sort of safer conversation about Pakistani identity, you know, Islam with a capital I with no recognition of difference. There is this threat, this increasing threat of fragmentation or splintering of some kind and a lack of continued social cohesion. And of course, one of the other problems is that not all the voices entering this space are palatable to everyone. So you do see, and I'll give the most obvious example which is the Pakistani Taliban amongst the savviest media actors in the country. They have a presence in the mainstream media because they are interviewed, because they are able to intimidate or access journalists and ask them to give them space and a voice on national platforms. They also have a lively online presence. Most of the religious extremist groups in Pakistan maintain Twitter accounts, blogs, Facebook pages. And there's increasingly a lot of space for this kind of divisive language and hate speech. And the most common example that is cited but in some ways was the most telling was the overall media response to the killing in 2010 of the former governor of the Punjab province, Salman Tahsi, who was assassinated by his bodyguard for calling for changes to Pakistan's controversial blasphemy laws. And what you saw happening was that there was at the exact same time, both on national channels, regional channels, online supporters of Salman Tahsi are coming out calling for Pakistan to revisit the blasphemy law and sort of promote tolerance and things like that. And on the other side, you actually saw lots of people coming out in support of the assassin against Salman Tahsi. And there was a lot of room for those kinds of views to be circulated. I'll just quickly start wrapping up here by saying that in addition to thinking about the sort of flip side of growing media access and inclusion, we should also be really careful at this point about naively assuming that everything that you hear in the Pakistani media or the public sphere is a genuine representation of the people's voice or a certain group's voice. We have to first ask whose voices are we hearing. And at this point, I'll just put in a quick reminder that the Pakistani private media and especially the broadcast media remains a largely urban middle-class phenomenon. There are large parts of Pakistan that remain media-dark, and this is primarily, of course, the western parts, Balochistan, Khyber-Bukhtunkhwa. The Pakistan state has not licensed private television channels to broadcast irrestrially, so these are all cable channels. And cable operators are then sort of curtailed for being able to develop the media infrastructure needed in some parts of the country and some parts because of the conflict situation, they aren't able to operate, but there may be sort of a larger design here as well in terms of controlling how much access the public actually has to this lively media space that I've been describing. The other thing, of course, is that the industry itself at all levels, perhaps with the exception at the moment of the social media space, is operating under multiple pressures and Pam has outlined some of them. The one that I'll just reiterate again is it is one of the most difficult environments in the world, I think, for journalists to operate. The threats come from all sides. I think that's what makes it particularly challenging is that it's not just the militants. And for those of you who follow this, you have seen that just this morning, the Pakistani Taliban have issued a hit list of journalists that they have now announced they will be trying to target in coming weeks. And they've sort of come out and put it in one of their memorandums saying that we consider the Pakistani media to be an actor in this conflict. They are confusing the public and we now are going to take our fight to the media as well. So that's the sort of pressure that we think is the only one, but there is, of course, as Pam mentioned, pressure from the army, from political parties, from state intelligence agencies. And then, of course, there is that pressure and in some ways it is the one that you feel most urgently when you do long interviews with media practitioners themselves, which is the financial model of the industry. The fact that this is ultimately a commercial game, that you are ultimately not serving the public, but the advertisers, that all the content you put out there has to get high ratings for this to be a sustainable phenomenon. And the end result of that is, as we do talk frequently, sensationalist media programming, appealing to the lowest common denominator, the lack of truly investigative journalism projects, even on non-controversial issues, etc. I'll just wrap up at this point and say that you actually see Pakistan grappling with this issue quite in a fairly fraught manner. There is a realization that increased media access will lead to more inclusion and more democratic conversations, greater accountability, especially at that lower level given that regional language channels and print publications are coming up at the exact same time that the Pakistan government has brought power from the central government to the provincial levels. There's actually a really nice synergy there. But also I think the greater concern now is about this concern about more hate speech, greater fragmentation and platforms for divisive voices and threatening voices as opposed to productive one. And you can see that the Pakistan government is approaching this in a sort of fumbly confused and genuinely lost way because we are simultaneously entering a fascinating period in Pakistan's media evolution. On one side the new government is going on with an auction of 3G spectrum which is I think scheduled for March this year or April. I can't remember, but this would of course enable those 70% of Pakistanis who have mobile phones to now come online and actually participate in the online debate, get access to more information than ever before to continue to watch television broadcasts even when they have electricity and the television is off and also to start accessing media from other parts of the country to sort of rise above the constraints of the cable medium and to actually have unprecedented access to this media space that I've been describing. At the same time the government is also building an internet filtering system and it is looking to use new technologies such as NetSweeper to filter internet content to control the space to somehow come back to that old-fashioned system of having top-down control over what information is circulating and this is all happening in parallel and it's the same government moving ahead with both policies and I think that's a really good indication of how these questions remain and they're really urgent both at a policy level but obviously in terms of people's ability to participate with a system that's changing. So I'll stop there and I look forward to debating some of this in the conversation afterwards. So let's move to Michael in a minute but I just wanted to just say one thing that Huma reminded me of and that is when Salmont Assyria was killed it was an incredible moment I think for the country.  One leadership would come out using the newly free media and come out strongly and say this is wrong, this has to be fixed we can't allow this we can't give in to this sort of thing which did not happen. No leader in the country stood up and said this is murder, this is wrong the blasphemy law needs reform murder is wrong. Instead what happened was the same media was allowed to generate and to echo and to promote this extraordinary outpouring from what we hope is a minority viewpoint. That championed the murder of a government official in the name of religion and thousands and thousands of people poured into the streets, I was in Karachi when there was a few weeks later or a week later there was thousands and thousands of people in the streets of Karachi marching in support of the assassination campaign. It was allowed to happen it was promoted in the media and it dominated the news so again you have opportunities that are being lost and you have misuse that's being allowed and that's why this is such a complicated topic how do you what's the weed and what's the chaff and how do you manage it so that's a question maybe we can talk about later so there's a couple of things I want to pick up on and I might mention to talk a little bit about someone to see an assassination in a few moments but there's one recommendation that certainly jumped out to us here at USIP from the report from BBC Media Action and from the use of an Emerson maker was the suggestion that in designing media interventions in coming up with media development policy for Pakistan that there should be far more researched and in particular a far greater amount of content analysis and attempt to understand what is actually happening in the Pakistan media as opposed to what we all constantly talk about what might be happening in the Pakistan media and I think this is something that applies not just to Pakistan just to come from another meeting this morning where the BBC was releasing another report looking at the role for media in fragile states generally I think one of the things that we agreed on there is that far more detailed research about what's happening in these key countries is essential there are people like me who are passing guests in these countries who go to Pakistan and read English language media who don't speak Urdu but who in some sense are involved in this debate or are involved in helping to design programs to do research to deliver training at different places in Pakistan without necessarily an understanding of what's happening in for example the Urdu language media the project that this research came out of was originally a project under the root of countering violent extremism I'm not sure I know from that for reasons that I'll get into in just a moment but one of the very interesting things for us in this research was that very quickly we became part of the story we got our first-hand experience of the sensationalism of the Pakistan media going around the different media organizations introducing ourselves saying that we wanted just to talk about the reporting of violence in particular political violence in Pakistan and I think two days into this event myself and my colleague Theodon who's in the audience were featured as the two gore handing out 50 million dollars to Pakistan media organizations and of course we hadn't been contacted we certainly didn't have 50 million dollars to hand out to Pakistan media organizations to carry any favor so we certainly hadn't been contacted about the story yet here on one of the evening talk shows was this sort of expose of what these two people were doing in Pakistan so we had our first-hand experience with sensationalism and other people involved in the media debate in Pakistan have as well so some of you may have seen the US Embassy cable that came out with the WikiLeaks our leaks where the US Embassy was basically saying we've had it up to here we can't trust the Pakistan media I think in particular that they were upset about GOTV and what they saw as incitement of violence and anti-Americanism and the cable was essentially requesting that the BBG stop its broadcast arrangement with GOTV and of course GOTV has their side of the story and they've rejected those claims quite dramatically but when that came out from WikiLeaks it was a couple of years after I'd been working in Pakistan for the media development organization Internews and we'd been trying to convince the Pakistan Embassy that they really should have a broad-based national media development program in Pakistan and we were just getting this real stonewalling interest in doing this in Pakistan whereas across the board in Afghanistan there was this very large national broad-based media development project and we found it very hard to understand and of course two or three years later it became quite easy to understand and we realised that inside of the embassy there was this sense that the Pakistan media is out of control and it's very difficult to engage so in framing some of the data to throw out today one of the things that we've tried to do with this research is to work out what is the most constructive and effective way to engage with Pakistan media organisations themselves to address any media development needs that they have and this is a something that as Jordan mentioned at the very beginning we feel that it's very important that the local media come up with a lot of the ideas about what happens in Pakistan going forward with media development that it's very easy for media development organisations to sit in Washington and say okay well we'll do training workshops and we'll set up radio stations and we'll do the kinds of things that we do pretty much everywhere that we go but as we move through some of the examples I think there are hopefully there will be places that we'll see that the characteristics of the programming and the choices that people are making in the way that they report certain incidents seem not to be the result of people not knowing that they shouldn't that they should use more than one source not knowing that they should provide context the Pakistan media has been growing and there are many new journalists but then there are also many people who are very very good at what they do and who know exactly what should be happening and so it's maybe not a it's not a it's not a situation where people need to go and teach people about sourcing it's more a situation where we sort of need to get a much better understanding about what is the calculus that's going on in different media organisations and in different newsrooms that lead people to make the decisions that they do and to get them to rethink that calculus because that's what's going to change things not necessarily another round of three-day training workshops and as Shotun mentioned it's also really important for us when we're thinking about the kinds of interventions, the kinds of programs that we're capable of providing the kind of support that we're providing that we respond to what the Pakistan media itself thinks will be used for that we start to come up with creative and non-standard ways to try to maybe shift some of the pressures in the same tubes to shift the calculus to the extent that we can so the project that we've embarked on was originally one in the rubric of countering violent extremism very quickly we came up against the problem of what is extremism in Pakistan because there's what people in Washington think is extremism or what people in Pakistan think is extremism very quickly it became clear that these were not necessarily the same things and so for example with the murder of the assassination of someone to see it you saw a lot of media reports in the western media that described that as extremism and pretty much cast it in exactly the same light as all kinds of violence perpetrated by different sectarian groups by the TTP and so forth and I think one of the more abusive when we embarked on this process one of the things that he was very very clear to brief us on was that there's a lot of and this is something that we heard from people in Pakistan in our first trip as well there's a certain mindset that maybe leads people to go out onto the streets and to support an assassination like that that leads the media to report on it in the way that it does and people who who necessarily support the assassination of someone to see it are people that support the TTP and in fact there's probably a very clear distinction between those groups of people and so what exactly are we talking about with extremism in Pakistan and so we sort of shifted the basis of our research to focus on the question of normalization of violence to what extent does the way that the Pakistan media report on violence lead people to believe that violence is an acceptable way to achieve social and political change or to what extent does it change the public standing or the acceptability of groups within Pakistan society who use violence as a means to try to achieve social and political change and in particular we focused on the natural language media so we weren't looking at the English language media we were looking at a combination of Urdu, Swaraki and Pashto language media organizations. Before we get into a little bit of the data one of the last things I just wanted to say by way of introduction is that a lot of the assessments that different organizations do when they go into do media development work in different countries are based on interviews we ask people whether it's people in the media or through focus groups what do you think is going on here and we draw a variety of conclusions from that and one of the things that came out of the data to some extent was that what people say they do what people think they do is not actually necessarily what they do and so content analysis alongside detailed interviews with people from media organizations and alongside audience research is really important in ground truthing what is actually happening content analysis itself only tells you what the media is doing of course it doesn't necessarily tell you why journalists in different media organizations did different things and it doesn't necessarily tell you what impact will that have on the audience members who consume that media but it's an essential part of it probably should be an essential part of assessments and not just at the beginning of projects but as these projects go forward and I've done more work in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the last 10 years and I'm not aware of a single detailed content analysis study that's been done in Afghanistan since 2001 masses of money has been invested in Afghanistan's media yet I'm not aware of a single content analysis there's been a little bit of media monitoring people are pulling on this and that but in terms of detailed content analysis of what local media organizations are doing what national media organizations are doing and not having that evidence base makes it really really difficult to adjust what we're doing as we go so one of the let's start moving into some data one of the things we can't see the slides so this is one of the things that we were told as soon as we sort of landed in Pakistan and this is actually a statement from a Pakistan non-government organization that focuses on peace just in case there are people who can't read it the media is inadvertently glorifying the militants through a section of the mainstream Pakistan media also though a section of the Pakistan media strives to be neutral or impartial it generally is not really or unconsciously it favors and glorifies radical groups individuals and activities an element of sympathy for radicals exists in the media we were told this by people we were told by newsread managers in Pakistan from some of the biggest media organizations that they their newsreels were being infiltrated is that it's okay to buy people from militant organizations or with militant sympathies and we've been doing reports based on interviews I'm sure that this is something that we probably would have highlighted that this is something that's coming from the heads of newsreels it's coming from different NGOs and civil society organizations it's sort of dovetail with other things that we were told by the managers of newsreels themselves one told us that this was around the same time but the floods were happening in Pakistan and we were told that if you went out into my newsroom and told the journalists here that American bombers cloud seeding in Pakistan had caused the floods half of them would accept that and would want to do stories about it so what did we actually find well what we found was that looking at I should say I'll give that one step because one thing I skipped over which is the content analysis period itself was from October the 8th to December the 8th 2012 two months of collecting radio, television and print from Ashto and Zaraki outlets we did different series of content analysis to identify the stories that were about political violence to identify the characteristics of those stories for example to what extent aggressors were identified to what extent victims were identified when people talked about victims when people reported about victims and when they reported about aggressors to what extent were they talked about in positive terms or negative terms to what extent were sources used who were those sources so overall when we took a look at the entire sample what we found was that the only aggressors to receive on balance any implicit endorsement of the use of violence were the police military or paramilitary forces which were grouped together in our analysis as security forces there was very, very clearly only the only stories that cast the use of violence in a positive light were regarded stories where that violence was coming from coming from the state and not from non-state actors in fact in 204 cases where the security forces attacked one or more unnamed individuals 26 of those reports about 13% demonstrated a positive slump toward the security forces the vast majority were neutral and only 1% negative overall about an 11.76% positivity rating if you like for security forces using violence against unnamed individuals when there were 39 cases where banned organisations attacked unnamed unnamed individuals they received no positive reports at all about half of the reports were neutral and about half of the reports were negative so when the security forces used violence it was positive one, positive to neutral when banned organisations used violence it was neutral slash negative reporting so if it were the case that the Pakistan media was being infiltrated by people with sentiments such as this quote suggests we might expect to see somewhat more sympathetic reporting in fact the sympathetic reporting that quote like that suggests doesn't seem to be taking place we were also really interested to understand how the Pakistan media was using framing to suggest things about the legitimacy of different actors using violence within academic media circles framing research is probably the most common form of research and there are certain very conscious choices that journalists make to cover stories and who to cover in those stories but the idea of framing is that there's also a certain unconscious, subconscious kinds of ways that we think about certain stories and the bias just the general way that we approach those stories and so we took a look at a whole series of different frames that we thought might be apparent in Pakistan media reporting in violence to what extent was violence characterised through a whole variety of terms and emphasis as terrorism to what extent was it seen as a was it framed as a criminal problem to what extent were aggressors or victims considered to be righteous to what extent were aggressors or victims considered to be brave and those kinds of framing elements one of the interesting things that we found was there was very little framing in the Pakistan media at all I think out of 8,000 segments or out of 12,000 newspaper articles and 8,000 segments of television I think only 2,000 of those so it was 2,000 out of 20,000 segments indicated that there was any use of framing at all and where there was framing it was the kind of framing that again sort of reinforced the idea that the government were the legitimate users of force and that the band organisations and non-state actors were the terrorists where there was righteousness it was certainly not the band organisations that were being cast in those kinds of terms one of the things we were surprised though was that there was so little framing that the reporting itself was just incredibly bland we also looked to see to what extent there were master narratives that were apparent in the Pakistan media if you're familiar with some of the countering violent extremism literature there's an awful lot of talk about the narratives that extremist scripts use and one of the things that people are constantly encouraged to do is countering violent extremisms is to counter the narratives and one of the things we were interested in was if Pakistan media is being infiltrated by people from these organisations are we seeing evidence of the kinds of narratives that militant organisations use themselves in Pakistan media reporting in fact are we seeing other kinds of narratives because there are narratives of the liberals in Pakistan there are conservative narratives of the military so we came up with a series of narratives or what we consider to be master narratives and just to give you an example of what a master narrative might be in the United States something like the American Dream when you say the American Dream and instantly people know what you're talking about and it's a master narrative that easily carries other stories and helps people to immediately identify what they're talking about and so we went through and I think you were actually involved in this process of identifying what are the kinds of master narratives that are apparent in media produced by extremist groups by the state by the military by liberals and to what extent do we see these kinds of master narratives coming up in the news reporting or the opinion reporting that's going on in Pakistan media and these narratives are the number of times that we found those narratives coming up in the Pakistan media reporting so again what we're seeing is if anything a great deal of blandness so we didn't we weren't seeing a lot of evidence that the Pakistan media was being infiltrated one of the things that we did then we sort of moved on to look at was to what extent are organisations like the TTP able to to influence Pakistan's media by threatening it and we've heard already today the threats against the Pakistan media made today there's been at least two fatwas issued over the last 18 months and many attacks against journalists and journalists in Pakistan are really sort of complex sort of dancing routine that they have to go through to both satisfy pressures put on them from the military to report on political violence in a particular way and from the militant groups themselves to report on political violence in very different ways obviously the military would like to see it in some sense downplayed and reported negatively when it is reported and the militant groups would like to see it reported and would like to see themselves reported positively and one of the things that we found was that there was interesting proximity effect when you look at reporting of political violence in Pakistan so one of the case studies that happened while in the con analysis period that we were looking at was the shooting of Malala Yusuf site and so one of the things that we looked at was what is the with regard to the aggressors and the victim how are they treated by the Pakistan media and how does that vary according to different media organizations and where they are based so we are sort of taken off the names of the media organizations for this presentation but the blue bars here which are showing how positive the treatment of Malala Yusuf site was in stories in which the TTP was named as an aggressor and where it is more positive is media organizations that are based outside of KP and FATA the orange bars where when they mention the TTP the positive treatment of Malala Yusuf site also starts sinking way too far we are taking a look at the negative treatment of aggressors overall the treatment of the TTP in this case was overwhelming and negative however when the TTP some stories mention the TTP as aggressor and some of them don't when the stories mention the TTP as aggressor for media organizations based outside of KP and FATA the stories were much more negative than stories that just mentioned the fact that there had been an incident in the same way media organizations based in KP and FATA they mentioned the TTP in a story the extent to which those stories were negative then became less negative really quickly run through a couple of other bits of the research so we can leave some time for questions this slide is showing the extent to which when media organizations provide in terms of the sources that they use what kind of information do they provide about those sources so the TTP and newspaper organizations provide a great deal of basic information but in terms of other kinds of contextual information that might help people make sense of what's happening in Pakistan in these political violence incidents information about the history of those organizations for example there's almost no contextual information provided along with those organizations and individuals in terms of the sourcing of the stories we take a look at this this is across the whole sample of political violence stories for two months television organizations use no sources in 30% of the stories one source in more than half and only dual source stories about 12% of the time newspapers in some sense are even worse there were no sources at all in half of the stories almost 40% of stories only had one source and two sources were used very rarely and this sort of goes back to one of the things I said at the beginning that the idea of using more than one source is not difficult it's not controversial you probably shouldn't need a training exercise to help people understand that so there must be some other reason why what is sourcing is going on I'm going to leave it there so we can have some time for questions but it's this kind of detailed content analysis that takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort but actually helps us to understand really what's going on in Pakistan in terms of how much contextual information is being provided to help people understand what's these political violence incidents to what extent are people being told who are the aggressors and those consequences thank you very much we've got just about half an hour left and great food for thought I was jotting some notes and I'll just make a couple of not comments but maybe raise some questions that we might discuss and before I do that I'd like to know is there anybody here from the Pakistan media yes? two, good please I would love to hear your comments about our presentation and any ideas that you have very much benefit from your input just a couple of things that occurred to me while I was listening there's a war of labels going on here a war of framing one man's brave martyr is another man's subversive delinquent forever and ever and the question is do you let that go or do you try to control it let's look at the battle of Shaheeds TTP calls it's dead Shaheed PAC Army calls it's dead Shaheed what do you do about that how do you how do you even begin what do you do you go on television and say no there's only one side only one side deserves to be called a martyr for Islam very difficult questions to answer in an Islamic state essentially very very difficult again to go back to your point I made a little bit earlier the media is only as good as the leadership of a country when you have a weak state when you have a weak civilian leadership you're not going to have a strong democratic media again lost opportunity so many times opportunities arise for leadership to assert itself and it doesn't happen this allows the airwaves to be dominated by people like I don't know Hamid Ghul and Faisal Rahman and they just grab people who have loud strong opinions and that again how do you control that do you train do you encourage do you reward do you punish do you support media that are being or not these are very important questions I think for a country like Pakistan we didn't say much about the positive role of the media and I want to mention a couple of things that we could talk about as well accountability both government, financial and abuses when I was researching my most recent book I found that in most of the cases which the abuse of women came to light it was because of media exposure in other words when media went into a little village or a little town where police were not lodging an FIR against someone who had gang raped it only started happening once media pressure Pakistani media pressure started so that's number one a very good thing number two financial accountability there's been some great scandals in the Pakistani media in the past few years which never would have happened before again there are always limits there are always sacred cows you can only go so far against certain people in certain groups but it's much better than it was third thing let's look at public service I happened to be in Pakistan a couple of weeks ago when there was publicity about the fatwa issued by Milana Samil Haq supporting the anti-polio vaccine campaign and it seems to be making a huge difference I talked to a number of doctors and health professionals who told me at the time that we've been giving this message forever and ever and ever but one announcement on television by a respected conservative Sunni cleric is far more powerful than anything we can do as doctors so I just thought that was an interesting you know when these messages are going out for good they're as powerful as when they go out for bad how do you choose how do you control how do you weigh how do you begin to handle all of this there was something the BBC report maybe Huma can talk about this a little bit what I liked in the BBC report was they talked about the role of the media as gatekeeper, agenda setter and watchdog we didn't really talk about that but I just thought maybe if she'd like to say a couple of things about that so we get a better sense of what that means maybe a little scorecard on all three briefly on the role and then finally I want to offer this comment based on Michael's comments about what is extremism and what is not I guess I'd put it this way the fulcrum of belief in Sunni or let's just say in Muslim Pakistan is not where we might wish it to be as Westerners but that doesn't mean it's wrong being anti-Western in Pakistan is not the same as being pro-Taliban and that's extremely important for us to understand they may not like us they may hate us but they may also hate the Taliban and I think it's really important that leadership in Pakistan both government, private, media continue to make that point we have to accept that we have to accept the fact that we the West are not popular among ordinary Pakistanis but neither is the Taliban and I think that's a very important message for for people to be sending out of the media in Pakistan anyway so I want to open up for questions and if either of the gentlemen from Pakistani media would like to say anything I'd be delighted sir yeah my name is Amanullah Prasad I've been covering Pakistan locally and internationally as well I agree with whatever was said here but there's one thing probably that's missing I have my own opinion I don't know if you can agree with me or not when it comes to glorifying the terrorists sometimes actually the political party competitions actually inadvertently they're journalists like in Pakistan they're journalists who are affiliated with the Pakistanis to remember our Sharia group they're journalists who are affiliated with the people's party now when the governor who belong to the Pakistan people's party the governor it was a very good chance for his political opponents to show the Pakistan people's party wrong or bad so they can get more votes in the next election therefore the main purpose behind like indirectly glorifying the terrorists so what happened so they had their own generals I'm not mentioning them they had their own generals so they thought probably it's a good chance now to condemn the governor because to make me look and again similarly when it comes to the Haibar Pakhtunkhwa the Pashtun Nationalists stand against the Taliban all the time now they lost the election they lost popularity for some many reasons Imran Khan for example he's a political leader now he's the leader of the Haibar Pakhtunkhwa the main biggest leader he had the reputation to be very soft on the Taliban so there are some journalists who before were supporters of the ANP the Nationalist Party they were very strong against the Taliban now they're keeping quiet because the leader is keeping quiet this is one very big challenge I think probably it's better if somebody communicates with the general and try to find a way to cut them off from the political party to let them know the national interest of the country is above that's the biggest problem I think so how would you go about that I mean again we're in a country where media media and media very often in Pakistan reflects the views of the owner or the group that's owning it how do you make an independent media I think it's very difficult actually Pakistan had this independent media all of us in it like you mentioned there are many problems probably electricity is a very big problem visionarism is a very big problem as well like when it comes to Karabakh Pashtun and Sindhis are totally against all the Pashtun and Sindhis generalists are against as well and many generalists are supporting it so we have this problem it's a very complex problem probably I think one way could be that the owner of all these big TV channels if they are approached and they are responsible to a large extent about the policy of their channels and they have their own different interests again, political parties, revenues, blah blah blah so if they know that actually when it comes to the single national interests of the country or let's say legitimacy of something how the generalists should work in that TV channel for example, take an example of GOTV, which are doing very well it's like for the last many years it's very pro-domestic so whatever they would say it would be in favor of the nation so this is a big problem I don't know, I personally don't know how this problem can be fixed but it's up for discussion do you have to say anything? My name is Shahin I've been associated with Pakistan television for a long time so I'm an insider and an outsider also because I've been involved with the socially meaningful theater group and we have been fighting extremism and forces of authoritarianism I think that the division or the government had the monopoly and so they were the major force determining the agenda for television then army was another force so when it came to national issues foreign policy letters then we couldn't touch army so media had to be very careful about that then came the media owners and especially with the cross-media ownership that they became too powerful and totally unaccountable I mean they have no force monitoring or their own fears and so they are just running amok and they are just sold to the god of ratings and do anything to get ratings so national interest or interest of the people that is not really the first thing in their mind and now another force has appeared this is the invisible enemy Taliban and their supporters so now I have noticed recently like in the last few months that the way our journalists refer to Taliban or their Taliban or living Taliban there is now a sense of respect and balance as if they are also respectable we have different words for someone who is killed for criminal activity and people who are martyrs so now they kind of balance it out and refer with great admiration or at least respect or fear when they are referring to Taliban and so whenever they are reporting it's not just political leadership who are showing opportunities but our media media owners as well as the anchors or reporters who are either fearful or they lack commitment and also this has permeated to the entertainment sector so now our dramas for example or music you see a lot of religious people a lot of bearded heroes who are actually saying prayers as well as sort of being the protagonist in the play and in all talk shows even entertainment oriented talk shows wherever there is a problem the solution lies with Mullah coming and giving an advice so media has actually added to our problem by catering for this kind of rating driven agenda and also opportunism when we find that it is much easy to exploit religion or exploit the so called ideology of Pakistan and get more ratings so it's much wider problem and I think for the media owners to be controlled and and to be held accountable either by government or by their own consumers because if that doesn't happen then I think the pressure and a very clever manipulation of media by Taliban the way they issue threats and the way they have sympathizers within the media I think they are going to then help the upper hand thank you let's open it up for general questions from the audience for our speakers sir thank you Pam a question I am Dr. Nisar Shahadri with Pakistan American League we mentioned about the image of Pakistan it is understandable the image of Pakistan will become better only if the people of Pakistan are given constitutional protection and there are democratic values and human rights are respected and Pam said the right thing media has got the power but does not exercise the responsibility that power bring along with it and the society is complex and difficult the because of absence of rule of law the diversity has become weakness of that country but USA in USA people the diversity has become the strength of the nation because of presence of rule of law this is the big difference here and now I will come to words from our it is a beautiful name beautiful bird and a very rare bird anyway you had shown many silver linings about Pakistan and as an analyst I still continue to remain concerned because even the nuclear clouds have a silver lining my question is related to two wrong question one is that since the country is run by individuals and not through institutions so it is generally a perception that there the in laws and out laws are more powerful than the laws so the rich people have bought or started their television channels to use them not only to protect their wealth some of them use it as a leverage the jungle 90 television channels in Pakistan the jungle is too small for so many lines do you think this perception how far there is a truth to it that most of the channels the people are bought and sold and many time to achieve their objectives because since the countries governed by individuals they use their television channel as a leverage the second part is is this area out of bounds for the media to educate people by questioning the ruling elite the leadership about their policies about their decency about their promises about their integrity about their character about their commitment towards their own people and the country thank you thank you for that I think the only thing that the media does and by media now I'm talking about news and current affairs, television shows and different languages as well as talk shows on private radio and journalists on Twitter so the whole lot of it I feel all they do is question the government about its policies and things I think what becomes I mean there is so much political bashing in the Pakistani media content and programming and one of the main reason for that is because there isn't that many other things that they can bash you can't talk about religious issues you can't talk about the army so that leaves the civilian government sort of up for grabs in some ways but I think the and I think the real question is why doesn't this 24-7 on multiple up to 25 news and current affairs channels constant critique of government officials constant exposés of their failures and governance at the local level it's down to things like why didn't this road get built at the national level it is big and increasingly more complex discussions about the counter-terrorism strategy relations with the US etc why isn't this making a difference I think that is the real question and I think that gets to a point which is broader than the media itself about Pakistani politics, the nature of it how truly democratic is the setup in a political patronage setup are our leaders truly elected are they truly accountable those are difficult difficult questions to answer something topic for another panel perhaps but from the media's point of view they actually feel that they are playing just this one role which is to try and hold the powers to account what they rely on because there is a lack of resources to do proper investigative work and because of the commercial model of the industry which requires them to continue to do new high ratings oriented programming so there is no space in this for a long three month investigative project that looks at some financial misappropriation and some low level contract given to the head rubber the electric supply company the space of the resources to do that they have to chase that sensationalist story this politician said this remark and we can make a joke about it or we can put pressure on them today but now tomorrow is a new day and another politician has said something else so there is no sustained coverage of political issues or systemic issues I think that is one of the problems and that very much is directly linked to the nature of the commercial and financial pressures on the industry to get those high ratings and sophisticated conversations to sort of talk more broadly about you made this point about individuals and I think the media industry offers a really interesting counter point because for the largest and most influential channels are all owned privately by families that have long associations with the media and if you talk to the top level management the owners the high level news directors senior journalists, news anchors right now there is deep deep introspection amongst the industry and we really are battling this problem how do we juggle these pressures on us how do we juggle the fact that our reporters are getting threats from the army from the Taliban, from the local political and the only thing that we are asking of them is to make us some money by doing a really cracking fun news report that we can run at 9pm there is so much deep introspection about issues like how to cover sectarian violence do you identify that act of violence as a sectarian clash do you name the Sunnis and Shias or whoever else is involved but a lot of them don't do it for fear of perpetuating further cycles of violence because if you say that four Shia men were killed that means tomorrow four Sunni men will be killed as well so then they try not to identify but then they come under fire for supporting certain groups or sects or things like that so the individuals are in fact in this way finding themselves increasingly powerless in the face of these broader pressures that they are facing and the way that they are trying to counter that goes back to the point Pam made about public service is that you are starting to see these campaigns within especially broadcast media, TV and radio where CEOs take it upon themselves to use some of the advertising revenue they get to internally finance public service campaigns that deal with things like health, dengue fever, polio there is a big campaign going on right now the young group is doing which is to promote education in the country they have actually done really effective campaigns against violence against women so they are trying to atone for the other sins that they feel that they are forced to do by doing this public service programming so in some ways I feel the individuals are the best position to try and save the problem I'll just say a quick note on politicization which has come up in many of the comments that came and I think again we have to connect this to this financial model of the industry that we are talking about which is actually viable these channels need to get money from somewhere and politicians are increasingly realizing that you cannot function in the Pakistani political space or the public space without having the mouthpiece that these channels offer and so the first thing they do is go to cash trap channels and behind the scenes give all sorts of money in order to get that kind of access that many of you have described so how do you tackle that problem some of it is just being watched dogs need to be watched as well we do need greater transparency amongst media groups they need to do financial reporting there has to be you know as there's nothing wrong with a channel having a political inclination but that's where questions come up that Michael has touched on which is you know what can we do to promote media literacy amongst audiences how do we give them the opportunity just to be able to recognize you know this channel is always PML and friendly there must be something going on a close relationship a political standpoint that the ownership has fine I get it so now I can be a bit more critical about their programming so there's lots of work that can be done and some of it is very doable it is just you know publish a annual report and let's start talking to students in our you know journalism programs and universities about being more critical about how they view media thanks my name is Steve Hirsch I am here as a senior U.S. editor for UPI next which is UPI's international mentoring program I do what I say with regard to what Hume just said in this country unless you work for the Washington Post of the New York Times you probably don't have the time to do those long investigative pieces either and you're thrown on a spectacular story like that's a topic for another meeting Pam mentioned media as watchdog and so this gentleman over here I just wanted to say that that one effort in that vein is something that we do at UPI in addition to mentoring young journalists we have a governance accountability site called TruthTracker which is modeled on PolitiFact which we use to write articles that trace Pakistani politicians performance on their promises and we have gotten some good ink and BBC in Urdu and BBC in English as well it's not my part of UPI next so I'm sort of reading from a paper here but we published about 130 articles that's been very popular and I think it's filling a need I think it's exactly what you're talking about it's small at this point but it's something that we've seen as well so I'm there with you I was thinking that what can be done there's a tendency for good objective articulate journalists like Hume to get fellowships to go all over the world and that's a good thing maybe an equally important use of international money from places like USIP and various media institutes would be to fund some long-term projects to take a newspaper or a team or an investigative team in one of the big newspapers or television and actually fund projects on some of these I don't know if anything like that has been done I don't think it has but it seems to me that it would be worth I bet we'd be happy to work with you Anna did you want to say something about that yes my name is Faiz Rahman actually I'm also from Pakistani well sort of I'm with the voice of America and I had the service there so we do broadcast Pakistan I have a question and before I ask that question I just give you a little example actually I briefly served as a senior news director at one of the top channels in Pakistan back then there were only two channels Geo and RYN was one of them so and one of the debates and the very serious discussion that we were going through was whether we want to be like Fox or CNN so in your study I mean did you find that how much the Pakistani media is basically influenced by the western media and all these issues that you know been raised by all of you basically you know reference back to the west you know like whose hero is who is one's terrorist and whose one's martyr you know we have had this discussion in this society in the west as a whole Nelson Mandela is a big example so and having said that and there is also one more very important point that Pakistan is a very illiterate country and you know if you have a national media you got to have stringers, correspondence in all across the country and in some of those areas people can even read but they become like overnight sensation by becoming an unpaid but the unpaid a card carrying correspondent and then you basically rule the area there you just become a hero so you have to take that into account also the infancy of the media because we just don't have the resources to recruit people with proper education there is no concept of sourcing using at least using one source or two sources and you know going through the whole process before it becomes an actual news item so but you know basically just going back to my simple question is what would you say how much the west the influence that west has on the Pakistani media thank you the highest ranking show in Pakistan right now is Pakistani Idol and we all know where that model came from which is of course the sort of music contest show and things you know that's a facetious answer to the question but I actually think that the industry it may pick up sort of journalists who come on US funded exchange programs of which there are quite a few actually and spend some time in newsrooms they go back with story ideas the online space is certainly looking to western online newspapers to see what sort of content you can put out but I don't think that content wise they are looking to the west as much as perhaps they were earlier on to try and figure out how to position themselves it is much more just the same way that you get inspiration you know I heard this great thing on NPR which looked at food let me do a story on food in my city I mean to that extent it happens everywhere the real impact and I think the significant impact that international media is having in Pakistan is when the western press covers an issue that was not being covered within the national media for reasons of intimidation, censorship whatever it was but the minute the New York Times does the story then everyone can talk about it and you say well the New York Times did the story and I think that has really opened up debate on many very controversial issues that otherwise would never have made it out there maybe that's why they expelled Declan I'll leave that to Declan to discuss and just very quickly I'm really glad you brought up the point about the stringers and we do talk a lot about this in the report it's the boring stuff about talking about media in Pakistan but up to 85% of the journalists working in Pakistan do so on a freelance basis they get paid irregularly and really really poorly and as you say there are perks to being a journalist what happens you set up shop you become the journalist in your village and then you take bribes and then you do stories that fit with whoever paid the highest amount of money that you know someone was willing to pay you and I think that again this is a simple way to be done, professionalise the journalist unions, professionalise the industry, make some sort of better arrangement especially for the broadcast media to pay its stringers more sustainably and consistently In some countries the USAP does research and the kinds of issues that we come up against is the things that people are saying which are the incitement of violence so it'll be a word of coverage or something else that's used over and again that incites violence and interestingly for us in Pakistan it's what's not being said which is interesting so in all the political violence incidents we looked at and only in 26% of the cases was an aggressor if it were actually identified if you looked at a particular incident for example the attempted assassination of Qazi Hussein Abad which also happened during that period there were 49 stories that we looked at in our sample in only one possibly two of those stories was there any suggestion made that the TTP might have actually been behind that which was pretty odd because only about 5 months earlier Qazi had said some particularly inflammatory things about the Jihad in Pakistan not really being a Jihad as opposed to the Jihad in Afghanistan being a Jihad and of course the TTP weren't particularly happy about that and made some overt threats yet 5 months later there's an assassination it's using a woman's suicide bomber a method that the TTP has used before there's a variety of possibly circumstantial but contextual elements that make you think well it'd be really worth investigating this but it didn't happen on the other hand when Benazir was assassinated it was immediately blamed on the TTP and probably had nothing to do with it in a different world ma'am what are some of the exchange programs of fostering professional development within Pakistan what are some of the things that you think as a state development that we should be engaging on the Jihad in Pakistan sure and that's not a simple question and it's partly sort of why we're going to the Pakistan media organisations themselves to try to say well these are the kinds of characteristics that we see in the reporting that you do of a political violence we sort of identify which ones of those are actually training deficits and could actually be addressed through training and which ones are happening because of other structural factors within the Pakistan media that are not going to be impacted by training and then hopefully also to identify so that it said some ways to change that calculus so one of the things that's being talked about a little bit is to what extent for example the advertising industry that it holds could to what extent are there individuals within that industry that could provide incentives for particular kinds of programs or disincentives for other kinds of programs to be broadcast and I think there was there was one instance a couple of years ago there was an infamous program where I forget the name of the hose an explosive of people in parks and and what they were people holding hands on dates in parks and some of the advertisers made their voices felt she lost that program got a program on another channel very quickly after that but at least there was some kind of suggestion that there are people within the advertising industry in Pakistan who are part of this base of the liberal elite who may have particular interests that they're willing to put money behind and it's probably not going to be one thing it's probably going to be a whole series of little things like that we'll have more on that in about two months time we're almost out of time obviously you'd like to say something well my name is Sherzaman in the recent part I was enrolled with some of the media industries in Pakistan so recently I'm an international student on one of the exchange programs by the US State Department in the red states so the things which we have which the panel discussed to somehow I would agree to some of the points like if Pakistan is the most dangerous country for journalists we have read so many reports we can agree but on the lighter note I would take this opportunity I'm glad, I feel comfortable I feel glad that the international media has raised the issue of monology it's an excellent but in the recent part I think I saw some of the stories about the one of the lady Samina Bake who had recently climbed the Mount Everest but right now I will take this opportunity to let you know that right now Samina Bake and Mirza Ali, brother and sister are on an adventure diplomacy mission so what they will do is to climb seven countries mountains including the Republic of Argentina the Republic of Indonesia Pakistan, Nepal, Russia so right now they are on a mission of seven countries you should definitely go with them I would I want that international media will also raise that issue as well because in the recent past the women empowerment is on a very peak stage thank you thank you very much I think we are out of time but I very much want to thank Ahoma and Michael would you like to say a couple of words each before we go or is this it any one single final comment from either of you look out for a a long report in about two months time okay please feel free to pick up copies of the BBC media action report outside thank you all for coming and hope we'll see you again soon