So here I am just got on to a flight which will first take me to Abu Dhabi and then on to Italy for a short work trip and I switch on the online entertainment system monitor on the front of my seat (and the back of the seat in front of me).
I switch to the news sections and there’s one story that is from Pakistan which is part of the leading stories.
The headline reads: “Mob attacks and kills member of minority community in Karachi market.”
Of course, the headline is all that matters. The dozens of passengers, mostly from countries other than Pakistan, would have seen this one story about Pakistan – and it could well be that this may be the only story that they will read about the country for some days, unless they actively search news related to Pakistan on the web. In today’s world, perception is reality, and that’s what matters, especially when you are talking about a country’s image in the eyes of the rest of the world.
You can invite as many travel YouTubers and Vloggers as you want, and provide them security and access to places (which even many Pakistanis would never have heard of and/or ventured to visit), and you can have a special council to facilitate incoming foreign investment and so on, but the story that will go out is that a mob in your largest city and financial centre attacked and killed a member of the minority community.
The way forward is to not use groups to further agendas because a point may well come, as it did in the past several times, where those groups will go out of control and start attacking the state
You will fret and fume and call western media biased and say that it only panders to negative news – but the fact is that it is what it is. The media acts pretty much the same way everywhere: ‘Dog bites man’ is, not news so much as ‘Man bites dog’. You will say that why doesn’t the western media cover how great and amazing Pakistan’s mountain scenery is – and the fact is that sections of the international media, including some top print, television, and online publications, have covered that in recent years. For example, K2’s legendary status as a mountain to be reckoned with and that it’s far more of a mountaineering challenge than Everest is now known pretty much all over the world, especially with the advent on social and digital media, where news related to travel and lifestyle are disseminated and shared at a pace that has left traditional media far behind.
But when events that relate to violence or death, or natural disasters and catastrophes, happen anywhere in the world, the media will pick it up. And that’s what happened in this case as well. This is a characteristic of the media that cannot be controlled by anyone, least of all a government, and the fact also is that generally speaking, people watch and read this kind of news as much, if not more, than fluffy feel-good stuff. And unfortunately, it’s such stories that can tend to bring down a country’s perception and therefore image in the eyes of the outside world quite quickly, notwithstanding the fact that said country has some of the best mountain landscape in the world and is among the world’s most hospitable societies, especially for foreign travelers.
So what’s the way forward? This isn’t really something that a senior civil servant at the country’s Ministry of Information will be able to fix or handle – the most he or she will be able to do is to issue a government statement on the killing and highlight the follow-up action of the police in catching the perpetrators and so on. He or she may even try to reach out to representatives of foreign media in Pakistan to get Pakistan’s point across, but they will not stop reporting the story, and at most, the bureaucrat’s job will be simply to convey the government’s view on the issue.
The answer to ‘what’s the way forward’ is known to most discerning people. The way forward is to not use groups to further agendas because a point may well come, as it did in the past several times, where those groups will go out of control and start attacking the state. This is not a hidden fact and was something acknowledged publicly in the past, in particular by General Pervez Musharraf when he was in power.
The question is a simple one: ‘Why don’t we learn from our past mistakes and misadventures?’