How Experience Becomes a Journalistic Asset? A Local Reporter’s Perspective to Understand Conflict-sensitive Reporting in the Troubled Pashtun Belt of Pakistan

Abstract

In a previous paper (in Press), we adopted a critical theory approach to argue that the model of objective journalism, while laying emphasis on neutrality and detachment, disconnects local reporters, in conflict scenario, from feeling the pain of their own ethnic community. Therefore, the objectivity model was found too simple to help ethnic Pashtun journalists know occupational intricacies of conflict-sensitive reporting in Pakistan’s northwestern terror-hit areas, a site for the U.S-led so-called global war on terror. Using phenomenology as a method, I take this argument further and offer my shared journalistic experience as a resource to establish that objectivity obfuscates power politics involved in text production while promoting an ahistorical culture. This is done through objectifying the local reporter’s relationship with the troubled site of occurrence (field), a relationship in which a reporter is made insensitive to his own presence as an ethnic body standing at a highly militarized political site to get him focused more on looking at reality through the detached lens of neutral observer. Objectify here means that they look at reality not from the human perspective but usually prefer to project aspects of reality using objectivity as a measuring rod to access facts. Using the commercial framework of objective reporting might give a text (news story) an economically-desired impersonal form. But the urge for neutrality and impartiality neither can solve the crisis of reporting nor can control a journalist’s bias by discouraging his/her feelings, emotions, and subjectivity. In Pakistan, local reporters not only provide gory spectacles of a conflict which has, according to official figures, consumed over 50,000 lives and displaced millions predominantly in the Pashtun Belt; but the journalists also are getting increasingly vulnerable to violence. This paper argues that neutrality is a challenge in conflict reporting on one’s own community much the same way as attachment is a sin in objective model of commercial journalism.

“We always report under pressure”: Professionalism and journalistic identity among regional journalists in a conflict zone

“…Our findings demonstrate the importance of the economic realities of Pakistan previously stated by Pintak and Nazir (2013), as well as the documented pressures Pakistani journalists face from their organizations (Ashraf, 2018; Shah et al, 2019). Our study showcases the tensions that journalists in the region must negotiate due to underfunding and organizational pressures.…”

“…Of the estimated 20,000 journalists in Pakistan, 1622 are regional journalists who work in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Ashraf, 2018), the north-Western province of Pakistan that borders Afghanistan. The ongoing "war on terror" has created far greater threats for the journalists in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa than journalists in metropolitan areas (Shah, 2018).…”

Associations among traumatic experiences, threat exposure, and mental health in Pakistani journalists

“…We are unsure whether our study sample is representative of the general population of Pakistani journalists due to the open recruitment procedure. In addition, there are no data available regarding the demographic characteristics of the estimated 20,000 journalists in Pakistan (Ashraf, 2018 ), precluding a comparison between our sample and the larger population of Pakistani journalists. Furthermore, we were not able to compensate participants and, therefore, relied on motivated individuals willing to be involved without compensation.…”