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.