EDITORIAL: The particulars that caused death of TV journalist Sadaf Naeem are still a matter of conjecture, but hopefully the committee set up by the Punjab government would soon let us know what actually happened and how she lost her life. However, what we do know is that she was under pressure from her channel’s newsroom to be first with ‘breaking news’ by talking to Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan as his long march motorcade was on the move to Islamabad.
Unlike most of the world electronic media, who come up with ‘breaking news’ only when it is really a scoop, we in Pakistan, however, describe as ‘breaking news’ even those news items that have taken a long time to report and are not necessarily time-sensitive. And the task to hunt the ‘breaking news’ is the principal responsibility of every reporter and cameraman out in the field. Sadaf too was on such a hunt – one could see her furiously running along Imran Khan’s container – but death hunted this scoop hunter.
While the public wants to know what actually happened her death has also, quite unexpectedly, caused a debate in the media circles about the safety and security of the reporters and cameramen. There have been a number of cases of TV crew being killed in their quest for ‘breaking news’ and this was quite common during the wave of terrorism that pervaded the country between 2008 and 2015. A kind of consensus now seems to be emerging that these losses and Sadaf’s death could have been averted had they been imparted adequate professional training and offered certain job security.
“There is a lack of interest in this area, I admit,” says the CEO of a leading Karachi-based TV channel. His organisation lost a cameraman in 2016 bomb attack at a Quetta hospital as the cameraman and many others had overlooked the possibility that there can be attack on those who had reached hospital to know the fate of victims of the earlier bomb attack.
Back-to-back explosions were quite common but journalists were never properly warned. The journalists in Pakistan risk their lives as they have not been properly trained to cover the insecure and risky situations. A large number of them do not enjoy medical cover and life insurance, etc. Let Sadaf’s sacrifice be the game-changer and help generate conditions and commitments on the part of owners of electronic media to ensure that their field workers are properly trained and equipped to be safe in dangerous situations and their jobs are secure and mutually binding.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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