Interview: On Pakistan, US PD, and VOA

As I have noted in a parallel post, the assassination of Mukarram Khan Aatif, a reporter employed by Deewa Radio (part of Voice of America's operation in Pakistan) raises a range of questions regarding American public diplomacy, especially in areas such as Pakistan or Afghanistan. The interview below was conducted with a former journalist from Pakistan, who provides important insight into the issue from the local perspective.

He requested not to be identified.

42 Journalists Killed in Pakistan since 1992/Motive Confirmed

From CPJ: Pakistan

Q: Do you know how many Pakistani reporters working for Western media outlets have been killed in recent years?

A: In Pakistan, maybe elsewhere too, journalists normally work for more than one news organization. Therefore any journalist killed had been somehow associated with both Pakistani and Western media. For the past two years, Pakistan has been the deadliest country in the world for journalists, according to Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) research. At least seven journalists were killed in direct relation to their work in 2011. Five of them were in targeted killings. Mukarram Khan Atif was the first journalist killed in 2012. He worked for a Pakistani television channel and Voice of America’s Pushto [sic] language Deewa Radio. It was probably the first incident in which the Taliban accepted responsibility for killing a journalist. The Taliban are media-savvy enough that they always demand of journalists to balance their reports by injecting their version too. It becomes a double whammy for journalists: when they inject the Taliban opinion, they face threats from Pakistani intelligence agencies; their editors drop or edit it out. And when they leave out Taliban’s opinion, they are threatened by the extremists.

Q: As it is noted in the NYT article, Western media organizations pay relatively better, thus attracting many local reporters. But what are some of the other motivations, if any, for these reporters?

A: Pay is the primary motive for Pakistani journalists to work for Western media organizations, especially for those who work in the periphery where other sources of income are few and Pakistani media organizations either don’t pay them for their work or they get very little from them.

I can say with confidence that it is poverty that drives them into this risky business of working for Western organizations. They know the costs for working Western media and living in a war zone where people see [wrongly or rightly] Western hand behind their misery. Just imagine, when the U.S.’s drones fire missiles at a house in a tribal area of Pakistan, while a person living close by works for Voice of America and everybody knows it! What does the VOA or State Department do to save his [there is no female journalist in those areas] life or to insure a better future of his family? There is no insurance policy for them and they work in a war zone.

"Type of Death" -- From CPJ: Pakistan

Q: Is VOA - or any of the other public diplomacy media - effective in what they do in Pakistan? If yes, what have they achieved thus far? If no, why do you think that’s the case?

A: VOA has a large chunk of listeners in Pakistan. However, its effectiveness—or otherwise—is clear from rising anti-Americanism in Pakistan. I think there is a disconnect between the U.S. foreign policy and it public diplomacy. Public diplomacy is a long-term investment, which is targeted towards the people of a country. But the U.S. has bracketed it with its foreign policy, which is backfiring. The U.S. is using the VOA as a foreign policy tool—in other words, a propaganda tool—rather than public diplomacy tool.

Q: So, according to you, public diplomacy should not be within foreign policy? If I understand you right, then what should it be seen as? Also, are you suggesting that as soon as it becomes a foreign policy tool, it is necessarily "propaganda"?

A: It is a tricky situation: both propaganda and public diplomacy stem from foreign policy. But my point is that propaganda is rooted in demonizing others, while public diplomacy is about creating a soft and friendly image of its own. VOA is doing the opposite of it; it is demonizing the U.S. and its culture by selective and non-objective reporting. This policy worked during the Cold War, but now, when there is a proliferation of information technology, people can easily differentiate between propaganda and objective reporting.

Specific job performed by the murdered reporter -- From CPJ: Pakistan

Q: What can VOA – or U.S. public diplomacy in general – do to improve their performance? Also, what can they do to better protect their reporters?

A: I think that journalists get killed in Pakistan because they are pushed by their editors, who sit in their cozy offices far away from the war zone, to do risky reporting. Skewed editorial judgment is also responsible for such killings. A Taliban spokesman told the BBC on Thursday that the VOA stringer had been killed because Deewa Radio would not accommodate their opinion in their reports. He told the BBC that he himself had asked the slain stringer to take Taliban’s version too in his reports against them, but the stringer told him “it is VOA’s policy not to air Taliban’s opinion.” Now here is the issue: If the U.S. can talk to the Taliban to make them agree for sharing power in Afghanistan, why their opinion is not aired on VOA? I don’t know how they balanced the news story if the war on terror is presented with the perspective of one party, with the total blackout of the other. Editors sitting in Washington, D.C. should keep the safety of their stringers in mind while deciding their editorial contents.

The second point is training of journalists. Journalists working for Western media are mostly not trained on how to report in a war zone. While the editors sitting in Washington, D.C. don’t know the ground realities. This leads to a situation in which editors ask for more opinion, which they could sell better than objective information.

Thank you.

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