[Dawn] NOW it is the realm of television programming and advertising that has attracted the Supreme Court's attention. Summoning the chief of the Pakistain Electronic Media Regulatory Authority in response to petitions moved by two conservative figures, the former amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami...
The Islamic Society, founded in 1941 in Lahore by Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi, aka
The Great Apostosizer. The Jamaat opposed the independence of Bangladesh but has operated an
independentbranch there since 1975. It maintains close ties with international Mohammedan groups such as the Moslem Brotherhood. the Taliban, and al-Qaeda. The Jamaat's objectives are the establishment of a pure Islamic state, governed by Sharia law. It is distinguished by its xenophobia, and its opposition to Westernization, capitalism, socialism, secularism, and liberalist social mores...
Qazi Hussain Ahmed
...the absolutely humorless, xenophobic former head of the Pak Jamaat-e-Islami. He was also head of the MMA, a coalition of religious parties formed after 2001 that eventually collapsed under the weight of the holy egos involved. Qazi was the patron of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar during the Afghan mujaheddin's war against the Soviets. His sermons are described as
fiery,which means they rely heavily on gospel and not at all on logic. Qazi once recommended drinking camel pee for good health, but that was before his kidneys went...
and a retired Supreme Court justice, Wajihuddin Ahmed, the court on Monday demanded action within a week against 'obscene' and 'vulgar' programming and advertisements on private TV channels aired in Pakistain. Pause for a moment and consider the various problems that afflict this country and that the court is embroiled in. That obscenity and vulgarity on television -- and this before the debate about whether the impugned content is at all obscene or vulgar -- figures in the scheme of things to fix at the highest levels at the moment is somewhat worrying.
Two points need to be made here. First, the excesses that do frequently occur on television -- from content that foments religious intolerance to coverage of terrorist attacks that are insensitive to victims' families and badly handled, and from opinion-laden shows that are divorced from fact to invasion of privacy and worse in intrusive programming -- do need serious redressal. However,
it's easy to be generous with someone else's money...
government regulation is not the way to go. The Musharraf era epitomised the problem: even the most ardent supporters of a free and independent media in power cannot be trusted to not use government regulation to stifle media freedom. Where self-regulation thus far has failed, perhaps what the government can do is act as a controller for the creation of a regulatory body that is truly independent, professionally run along non-ideological lines and responsive to both the media's and consumers' concerns. But to trust the government with a direct and hands-on role in regulating media content is
an unwelcome idea: today it is obscenity and vulgarity, tomorrow it will be the 'national interest' and 'national security' that will demand certain lines be drawn.
Second, the outmoded idea of what content is vulgar or obscene needs to be discarded. Strangely, violence on television -- domestic, criminal, extrajudicial -- rarely attracts the same kind of censure as does content in which women are attired in a certain way or filmed interacting with men in a certain way. The same goes for intolerance, xenophobia, bigotry and hate spewed on TV: it doesn't attract the same kind of censure as does a woman dancing or singing lustily. The collective ownership that society wants to impose on its women is a problem itself. In the name of moral policing, Pakistain has ended up with deeply skewed priorities: keep the women covered up; let the monsters run loose.