‘Maza Nahin Aya’: Negotiating Sensationalism in Pakistani Television News Practices

Abstract

Over the course of the last 18 years, privatised television news channels have transformed the nature of the national news culture in Pakistan. In addition to sensational news packaging, leading current affairs talk-show hosts routinely capitalise on aggressive interrogative tactics to antagonise politicians on air, producing a dramatised performance that feeds a politics of publicity. Within this context, the emancipatory potential of television once celebrated through media deregulation in the early 2000s has since been replaced with a disdainful liberal discourse on the lack of critical-rational debate. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of television news professionals in Karachi, I explore how Pakistani news media professionals negotiate the tension between a principled commitment to protecting the ‘independence’ of mass media and a cynical disavowal of its existing forms. Sensationalist media programming is certainly not unique to Pakistani television, and an increasing interest in postcolonial news publics continues to provide much needed perspectives from non-Western models of journalism, yet I believe a scholarly focus on media sensationalism remains impoverished without an understanding of the contextual constraints within which television news producers mediate their livelihood. In this article, I argue that the prevailing discourse on the ethics of journalism in Pakistan becomes a productive site through which the differences between privileged and vulnerable media labour emerge as most apparent.