Janaza

Millat ka Janaza hay zara shaan say niklay.

The collapse of our civilization and the abject slide of our culture and society towards the dung heap of history can be assessed by looking closely at a bevy of different metrices. To each their own. There is a marked deterioration in educational standards and the number of Pakistanis who can compete at the global level deceases, thought the average national level of education increases with time. There is a general breakdown of law and order in the country with the control of government and the rule of law being eroded over the past decades to an extent that most laws are flouted openly and without fear or remorse by Pakistanis on a regular basis. There is a marked increase of intolerance and extremism and the desire to resort to violence to force your own agenda on others. How many other examples can I come up with, everyone has their own metric that they can use to show that Pakistan is in fact circling ever so slowly around the sink.

One metric that occurred to me recently is that we, as a nation , do not have any decent news channel any more. There used to be one channel, Dawn, that upheld some semblance of sanity and seriousness. But, to survive in the competitive environment they had to add the regular staples of Pakistani media, cheap humour, ill bred commentry, dishonourable accents and tones for taunting people and the brain numbingly ill thought out cartoons and gimmicks shown regularly on these news channels.

It is a shame that a nation of 170 million people is unable to provide a large enough economic market to make one decent news channel feasible. Shame on us. And it would have been forgivable if the Pakistani market was large enough for only five channels, there are more than twenty news channels in Pakistan and yet a decent channel can not hold enough clout to manage its share of the market. Shame on us, shame on us. This is what the nation has come down to, we would prefer the likes of such disgusting abominations on the face of society as Geo and any other Pakistani news channel then to watch a decent news channel long enough for a nation of 170 million to boast that they have at least one decent news channel.

If you do not agree with me and say that our channels are bastions of well behaved decency, then you will do good to ask around and see what is the opinion of people on a channel that will continuously have a breaking news item for months on end and the news item will end with at least 8 exclamation marks. What is that? I mean seriously what is that.

There used to be a thing like Journalism and Newscasting on our planet. We know about their existence, because we have seen them coming out of many different countries and states. Unfortunately our media industry is bent upon diving head first to the lowest common denominator, and I do not think that they are far away from this goal.

Being forced to watch Pakistani news channels for the past couple of days has made me realize that a nation that shows this quality and content of material as national television can only be doomed and nothing else.

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