New media fires old media

By Alee Paul

I never want to criticize anything.  We the people beautifully give a comprehensive solution to the problems, and even the way we identify problem that jolts me. Ask anybody over a cup of tea what is this nation’s biggest problem, everybody will close argument by wrapping it in one word, Education, poverty, bureaucracy and the list goes on. The continuous bombardment of issues from media to the nation’s head has made so many scholars out of us that we even forgot to identify what is the actual issue around here? So what is really the issue here? Question still remains.

Do we have our own opinion? Or what we are talking about is Hamid Mir, Talat Hussain and whosoever banging inside our heads. No we don’t, all is cooked up. We don’t want to think anymore, we don’t want to take a break from news now, we want updates every second, even if they are shocking enough to listen that my neighborhood was targeted by American drones last night while I was having peanuts. The channels are baking every insignificant news to ‘Breaking News’ not just because they want to, but also because what we want to hear is what we want to hear from them. Talking about the latest Maya Khan Fiasco and the drop scene was as I was expecting it to be. She got fired from that channel along with her production crew.

It was not a surprise, not something very new for me in this country, recalling the past I find so many similar stories, whether it’s Dr. Abdul Qadir Khan who was the face of the crime of Nuclear Proliferation and saved millions of lives by confessing or his former president Pervez Musharraf accepting Laal Masjid Operation as a mistake and nobody knows who else were accompanying him on those kinds of misadventures. See everybody is as naked here. Samaa TV stepped forward, apologized, presented disclaimer and did what was required in ‘greater good’ of organization. Thanks but no Thanks Samaa. We never wanted that, what we want is why that kind of thing got on air in the first place.

It’s not about Maya khan, don’t worry I am not playing devil’s advocate here. It’s about stepping out of Maya khan, and let’s contemplate for a millisecond, was firing her the best we wanted from Samaa? Was all that campaigning from Social Media to get her fired or we really want to change something around here at this point of time?

From where I see we don’t want to change our very own collective unconscious here because we believe in hating the sinner (which by the way Maya herself did too), but we don’t want to eliminate the sin and then we make common cognitive errors. We create demons to kill other demons and when the new demon starts messing we market another one more fierce and beasty in nature, and we get stuck in a vicious cycle of demonization. The demon factory created trained militia ‘Taliban’ to fight soviets, Media to encounter society’s deep dark secrets and millions of other examples we can find in our daily lives. Are we going to blame Maya for all this? Because what we do best in a stress or a panic situation is to blame. Blame game is the national game for us. I don’t want to accept at my face that a Lion can be the leader of jackals. We have to cogitate that what we want is a change of face or a change of thought process. If it would not have been Maya, it would have been somebody else. We are in a hurry we want to close the case as soon as possible and wait for another problem to hit us in the head, and that’s what we are best at. Given the problem, thought it for a second and bingo ‘we have the solution’ JUST fire her! We have no time to get hooked up to a single cause for so long.

Finally a sincere apology to Maya for losing her job, we didn’t mean to hurt you either, like you didn’t want somebody to get hurt with your program. With you Maya there are millions of your kind who deserve this or may be worse, but eventually they are not losing their jobs because they are playing it safe. See that’s common between cricket and life, one wrong selection of the shot and you will be directed to pavilion with no mercy.