Pakistan: Responding to Covid-19 challenges with innovation
Reporting on the coronavirus in one of the most press restrictive environments in the world is a challenge – but it also opens up for new opportunities in local media.
Like elsewhere, the media in Pakistan is being tested on how to report the outbreak and impact of Covid-19, a phenomenon overwhelming state and society alike. Already one of the most difficult places on the planet to practice journalism in the pre-outbreak period due to its restrictive free speech environment and impunity of crimes against journalists, new challenges abound for Pakistani media in meeting its mandate of being the guardian of public interest on reporting Covid-19.
From having to deal with new health-related safety issues for journalists in the workplace and risky field reporting environments to facing increasing mobility restrictions in the face of lockdowns; and from discovering a lack of reporters and editors who understand public health issues or access to health experts to generate reliable information, to facing challenges in generating adequate specialist content, the media in Pakistan is severely challenged professionally, but responding to the challenges.
Hard media environment:
These challenges are exacerbated by the traditional context in which the media operates in Pakistan. The current government, in place for two years now, has implemented a coercive agenda to curtail free speech and pressurize media at the political level that hurts not just media but socio-political rights and civil liberties as well, adversely impacting freedom of expression and access to information. The Covid-19 situation has simply provided the government, one of the most media-unfriendly in recent decades, an opportunity to further this agenda in the garb of ostensibly discouraging panic and paranoia.
Even if the media could operate on an optimal level, it is challenged in informing public about the outbreak and its impact. On keeping the public informed about its response to the virus, the Pakistan government has not been able to mobilize the relevant departments, develop a well-coordinated action plan and provide trustworthy leadership. The messaging on Covid-19 from the government continues to be confused and driven by the dynamics of its adversarial political relations with the country’s provinces.
The media’s credibility, therefore, and the quality of the Covid-19 situation information it is providing is impacted by the restrictions and degraded capacities forced upon it. These are hard times in Pakistan for regular media to provide reliable and adequate information based on people’s enhanced needs.
Despite these challenges, mainstream Pakistani media, insofar as basic Covid-19 information such as reliable figures of victims and identification of the interfaces where the public and officialdom can engage on responding to the health crisis is concerned, has responded with innovation. This has somewhat enhanced the credibility of media since the public does not seem to be getting useful information directly from the government.
As the mediator between the citizen and state, the media is, generally, helping sift between reliable and unreliable information and between information, disinformation and misinformation. By holding the government accountable for its underwhelming Covid-19 response, the media, in general, is also staying true to its mandate of being the guardian of public interest.
Rising to the occasion: media innovation and transformation
Never one to give up, the media in Pakistan has accepted the challenges of tackling restrictive policy environment and workflow blues by innovating their operational and news content strategies. For starters, mainstream print establishments (facing distribution problems) and even current affairs TV channels which can’t generate pre-outbreak levels of field-based content have rapidly beefed up their digital operations, reworking their websites and social media accounts to focus on Covid-19 coverage.
Through a range of activities, IMS works with local digital journalism platforms in advocating for a facilitative environment for indenpendent digital media in Pakistan. Among them are Dawn.com, Humsub and Sujag who have all created new initiatives to provide reliable and diverse information to the country’s public.
Dawn.com, part of one of Pakistan’s largest media groups, for example, is your standard independent English news media operation that carries the entire gamut of journalism formats including hard news, analyses, features and independent opinions. “We decided to retain all these with an overwhelming focus on Covid-19 and to add value to the special coverage, and have launched three distinct customized content categories,” says Jahanzaib Haque, the chief digital strategist and editor of the platform.
The first is Live Coronavirus Updates– a live tabulation of key news and other information coming in about the virus condensed to a byte size display with links to details for those interested. It provides a quick update, helping readers skirt the information overload. The second is the Pakistan Corona Statistics Dashboard – which contains tabulated statistical updates from the federal and provincial governments which are otherwise not generated from a single source in the government. Another is the #coronagoodnews on its account on Instagram, which has proven popular as it offers a conscious effort to move away from the ‘scary and intense’ side that characterises the mainstream coverage of Covid-19. “These three streams, feeding into the media groups other social media accounts, are generating immense traffic, which has grown six-fold from before Covid-19 hit Pakistan,” Haque adds.
