Don’t play dead with a vulture. That’s exactly what they want. And now when they are everywhere,. just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can’t see it, something is quietly closing in on you, so quiet in fact you can only hear it as silence. Find those pockets without sound. That’s where it is. Right at this moment. But don’t look. Only this time as you start to exhale try to imagine how fast it will happen, how hard it’s gonna hit you, how many times it will stab your jugular with its teeth or are they nails?
These vultures have earlier stabbed our jugular veins with their greedy teeth and nails, they are hordes of meanly and horribly smiling vultures for whom you are ‘mere votes’ — time to stop them trampling on our dreams. Today a large number of us are living in fear with deep anger and frustration. Maybe the anger and frustration was hidden somewhere deep in our hearts and has now surfaced because of the unprecedented misery that has befallen on this nation. What makes it worse is when those in power iand those who brought them to power, nstead of acknowledging that they should have been proactive are either passing the buck or carrying on huge PR exercises through thier bought up big media houses. In India this type of media is called Godi media or adopted media. Adopted because the india business tycoon and one of world’s riches man, Mukesh Ambani bought up all big media houses and showered it on the feet of Narendra Modi, who has been sing these famous media houses for his and his party’s benefit. Similarly our Godi media the news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Business also has become a prominent player in the manipulation of perception and in the corruption of the public policy process.
Remember Shahbaz Sharif recently defended his “beggars can’t be choosers”. So he thinks the Pakistani nation is a beggar nation. But who is responsible for this begging bowl given to us. The Sharifs and the Zardari tiola. We have seen how, for some time, behind the smoke screen, however, government officials and politicians are increasing spending and adding new programs in the routine budgeting and appropriations processes. When journalists reported on a new program, they usually characterized it as good news. Journalists conspired with politicians to create an image of a government fighting to end the deficit crisis, but they ignored the routine procedures that increased the deficit.
The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity.
The stock market is also fertile ground for planted stories. Rumors or allegations spread by short sellers often drive a stock’s price down. There may be nothing wrong with either the official’s performance or the stock’s value, but the willingness of the press to report innuendos and rumors as news changes reality.
Indeed, much of what appears in the newspapers as business news is nothing more than corporate propaganda. One consequence of the prevalence of propaganda in the press is that the public’s confidence in all institutions gradually erodes. As people begin to realize that they are being misled, manipulated, and lied to, they resent it and rise against the government, as we are witnessing now.
The press’s inability to report events or trends that are not crises is not limited to public affairs and domestic news. In his amusing and anecdotal book Who Stole the News?: Why We Can’t Keep Up with What Happens in the World, longtime Associated Press special correspondent Mort Rosenblum argues that foreign correspondents sacrifice coverage of important but undramatic long-term trends in favor of dramatic events whose real importance may be minimal. Coups and earthquakes, he says, are what editors want to report. But when reporters try to cover “crucial trends taking shape at the normal pace of human events—slowly…editors have trouble packaging them.” Rosenblum, like Weaver, argues that the press is far too willing to accept government officials’ self-promoting versions of events. He quotes Reuven Frank, a former president of NBC News, as asserting, “News is whatever the goddamn government says it is.”
We are seeing what is being published in our press. A press driven by drama and crises creates a government driven by response to crises. Such an “emergency government can’t govern,” Weaver concludes. “Not only does public support for emergency policies evaporate the minute they’re in place and the crisis passes, that is exactly what happened in Saudi Arabia when people started chanting Chor Chor in Masjid-e-Nabwi SA. It will happen again and again and again, here , there and everywhere.
