Adnan Rehmat: My name is Adnan Rehmat. I have a journalism and media development background and work mostly on media professionalisation issues such as the promotion of public interest journalism and greater public interest narratives in the media and diversity and pluralism in media. Currently, I am working as a program manager for International Media Support, which is a Denmark-based international NGO (Non-Government Organisation) that works to promote public interest journalism across the world, particularly in countries facing conflicts or transitions where it is usually difficult to practice public interest journalism and I have been in this business for over 30 years.
Haroon ur Rasheed Baloch: You have seen a lot of developments in the Pakistani media landscape and its transition because of emerging new technologies like AI technology, natural language processing technology, automated news writing, content production, and distribution. In your opinion, how are emerging digital organisations in Pakistan targeting their audiences through understanding analytics online? How do you see the situation overall for Pakistani digital newsrooms? Are they incorporating AI technologies?
Adnan Rehmat: Basically, there are two primary caveats that one should know so my answer is better understood. First; the media in Pakistan is primarily done by the corporate sector while the state even after over 20 years of privatisation of the airwaves, is still one of the three largest media owners in the country. Thus, we have a hybrid context where there are different sets of rules, one which the public sector media operates under and another for the private sector and often, they are in conflict in terms of setting news agendas and the kinds of narratives they would prefer to run. Considering Pakistan's political background, the state is often intolerant of pluralism and diversity.
I think in Pakistan’s context the recent acceleration in the introduction of technologies as a means of operating or managing media systems is a game changer or certainly a factor that is impacting media like never before. If you look at the state sector, you see the state isn't bothered about trying to understand the impact of AI or planning on how to use it which may not be a bad thing for now because the state’s instincts are to use it often either for first stating their media agendas or to push certain kinds of agenda often not in the public interest. In the private sector, the conventional corporate sector runs the media. There are big media houses like Dawn Group, Jang Group among other large media entities. Again, there are two types of businesses running media. Those that I call ‘Media Only’ businesses and others that mostly have other corporate interests but in recent years have joined the media business, I call these ‘Media Also’ businesses. And there is a clear distinction in how they think and operate. The Media Only businesses are better placed in planning for and implementing AI as they have large audiences that they cannot afford to lose. Thus, comparatively speaking, owing to their greater degree of professionalism, they are using various means to embellish their media business and striving to improve their outreach to the audiences.
The second caveat: AI offers Pakistani media an opportunity as they face many regulatory checks. It offers solutions to resolve the problems and challenges they've been facing like receding trust among the public etc. AI potentially offers an opportunity where they can find professional ways of improving their outreach and pulling in new audiences. By examining data, they can improve all these processes.
The other question that you asked was: where does the Pakistani media sector stand in terms of these changes? This requires a detailed look into specific and general practices. We see that the big groups Dawn and Jang are ahead of the curve compared to other corporate houses that may be influential but not necessarily professional. ARY, Samaa and some others have cross-media ownership not just limited to television and newspapers but have little reach. However, the audiences themselves have also migrated towards online journalism.
Haroon ur Rasheed Baloch: How are journalists at an individual level faring and has their ethics and storytelling impacted societies after including AI in their practice? How do you gauge their understanding with regard to the ethical considerations? Do they have a proper understanding with regard to algorithmic biases that can impact society? And are they prepared? There are civil and political rights, however, when we practice journalism, we don't have the right to information. How do you see the ethical norms a journalist should follow and how will the power of AI impact the overall scenario?
Adnan Rehmat: I think the fundamental question is how ethical Pakistani media is and does increasing the use of AI offers an opportunity to improve the level of ethical journalism. We must understand media is an industry owned by corporate entities and journalists are the workers, or essentially the labour employed by this industry. Pakistan is not exactly known for professional journalism by media corporate entities. This is because Pakistan's corporate media has political interests while other political compulsions ensure that they are not targeted by the state or other factors. Thus, they strike compromises. Having said that, they are still media entities doing their job. Thus, if you look at the news media subsector, the workers that work for them are journalists, so we'll have to see whether the codes of ethics are in place and to what extent they are followed. What are the compulsions, what is mandatory and what is voluntary, etc.? Your answer lies in knowing the industry representative associations that regulate the print media, the broadcast industry in the private sector, and the association for both radio and TV. Both have their respective code of ethics similar to newspapers. However, we see the television PBA codes incorporating new realities besides the same journalism principles and public interest. I think in industrial terms, the media industry owners don't emphasise upon ethics in journalists on an individual level or as part of their professional associations. When media owners don't mandate it, clearly compromises are made. In that sense, AI and the opportunity that it represents are not being translated into an opening whereby the rules of the media game and the news media game will be negotiated anew or adopted. Having said that I think we need to understand that the big media mediums and others are embracing AI in two ways. This might affect the quality of journalism as well.
The first is how AI processes are improving the workflows or making them more efficient which means you know some processes like research work and then reaching out to new audiences. All of this can be done by using new technology so that you know new sources can add some depth and while you know some types of journalism in Pakistan are not allowed particularly where the state and its policies are involved, other technology can help you in still doing the story without attracting a crackdown. The second one is media digitalising everything like online television and newspapers. If you have access to a great deal of data that you can use to analyse what your audience wants where you're reaching out and you can also conduct surveys and use technology to be clearer about what type of information is needed and I think we see this already in practice. For example, dawn.com has changed. Now it generates a lot of information that it is TV and newspaper does not and it's for their online upside audience so technology AI is helping the more information conscious, and they can exercise a greater degree of in relative terms professionalism using that technology.
Haroon ur Rasheed Baloch: You mentioned earlier the state is an important entity in this landscape. Are there others also influencing the news and storytelling business? For example, audiences also have a direct impact, it is not only media impacting the audience, because digital technology and the new tools introduced like social media etc, are also influencing the content of media. Take the case of the market and the advertisers. In the case of conventional media in Pakistan, advertisers are manipulating the message. With AI do you see the advertiser having an influence on the storytelling and how will this impact be seen in the future?
Adnan Rehmat: I think again in two ways. What is the media going to do, and what are audiences going to do about it? We can see larger media and not only the larger media houses positioning themselves by way of understanding better what the audience wants but also understanding that there are states that still think television has a greater nuisance value and therefore there's bigger money involved there from public sector advertising. These media houses understand this and have simply given up investigative journalism. If you look at prime-time TV news, it is just headlines.
The most influential (in my opinion) private TV channel, Geo, has a 9 pm to 10 pm news bulletin and the first half hour is only headlines and one headline after another because somewhere the government thinks it's all right you know as long as details are not given then we're not going to target them and the media has realised it’s okay we need to be wary about this and we also know the audience isn't interested in headlines so that some of those headlines will keep for that one hour. This has become a vicious cycle where most TV channels are now doing this, and I think it affects the news agenda. The headline is not information, it's just an alert about the information that has gone missing. You look at Pakistani print media, it’s just headlines on the front page and back page and TV has copied that. On the other hand, I think nowhere in the world do youth follow news that does not interest them. They are not interested in conventional formats of informational journalism like news bulletins. They mostly follow social media, they go online, and they only want the information they want, rather than be curious about what is happening and be exposed to that information. This means they are affecting news agendas which means they are increasingly making light of information that they need to verify, and this is easily converting into opinion. The attitude in many other channels is what the audience wants, let us give them that. It's because of this attitude more of that slowly the whole audience is becoming media and turning into new sources themselves. This is a new phenomenon not more than 10 to 12 years old which is more infotainment than information and AI is being used to perpetuate this model and this is also happening in Pakistan.
Haroon ur Rasheed Baloch: Other than audience how do you see the role of advertisers in setting the news agendas?
Adnan Rehmat: Advertisers are settling in when it comes to big media. Take Pakistan’s 10 big advertisers by categories like the telecom sector, food and beverages like Pepsi, KFC etc and the banking sector. You cannot find much content on these sectors in the news. That is because they are advertising two-thirds of the content coming from larger entities. In the property sector, DHA and Bahria and some other big players have come in. You will not find news about a lot of these big sectors impacting consumers. You can only find online independent and at some point, I think we should mention is also a separate ecosystem of non-conventional media that is also emerging in Pakistan as in many other places we usually know a few years late in catching up with friends but it's happy where public interest information you know, communities need information and so I believe in this news. You can use concept the only way journalism can survive that consumers can use to either improve their understanding of something or they can use it to access some service or other follow-up.
The information cannot just be ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ whatever, and so these independent content producers and I do not mean the YouTubers, they are just opinions. They can vary from the bad to really crazy and so that's not the true job and they focus on the intermediate, you know, more community-oriented in Punjab and the agriculture sector and then for opinion we have a situation where anybody can write for them and all those opinions that you can't find on you know you only find Hassan Nisar on prime-time Geo and Irshad Bhatti certain types so there are other people who want you know this and I have and so people who want to speak about issues that aren’t on conventional media then these little interesting small information operations community information even you know small communities several hundreds of thousands of consumers that pretty regular in their in visiting and consumption and contributing as also citizen journalist you know that little ecosystem is also influencing the use of technology and AI and it's helping these information independent information operations become slightly more sustainable than they said 10 years ago.
Haroon ur Rasheed Baloch: You have already mentioned alternate spaces like small digital media being practised in different parts of the country not as YouTubers or as individual journalists, it is not in a real professional manner but as definite groups, individual or small level groups like native media or TCM. Is this space going to expand and will the news agenda become more liberal than today as we have seen in the conventional media case?
Adnan Rehmat: Oh yes! You know the news agenda is going to expand because if you look at not just the state but our deep state where it has just experimented with a political party and used you know what they themselves called the fifth information generation youth in providing them of course not information but propaganda and that's because the deep state thinks it is really important to influence them. After all, let's say since the last martial law ended in 2007, and elections were held in 2008, between then and now, over 20 million new voters have been added and because our news dissemination is obsolete, a large part of that demographic has been using digital media, digital space and online spaces. Conventional media was slow in understanding this demographic as a potential audience. In the fifth generation war propaganda has been turned into fact. Propaganda can be information and be all about positive discrimination but in the wrong hands can become a hazard.
I think Pakistani people are interested in information. They are not information-shy or information-phobic, everybody has an opinion because not everybody gets to hear their opinion on conventional media. The online spaces you look at how this small ecosystem of YouTubers where all those journalists that the deep state kept out of conventional media for what now looks like really deep state back then thought was hate speech was nothing compared to what they can do now online through YouTube and they can't shut it down since you have to shut the entire YouTube to shut them down. More and more people are using and will continue to use these technologies reaching even more public.
Second, the creation of the broader media landscape in terms of audiences means that audiences are becoming very choosy creating special bubbles as we expected. A few years ago, people were interested, for a particular time, in a particular subject and very quickly we would find a lot of small operations catering to them, and in some cases also generating those interests. But this is a short-lived phenomenon, and they always move on to the next thing. To cite an example, in Pakistan, elections are to be held soon, thus elections will become a big thing. Recently, there was the May 9 incident. After it occurred, for several weeks nothing else was being talked about online whereas the mainstream media can't even say one word about it. Now there’s the Imran issue. The authorities even blocked Imran’s picture on mainstream channels when he was meeting the IMF delegation, but this will eventually change because there is a limit to the state’s ability to keep people away from information, they don't want them to be consuming. This is not possible anymore and a middle ground will have to be reached during the election campaigning. After the elections, things will return to normal as then information agendas will not be as polarising and eventually people will go on to other issues. This will mean more normal news which is more boring news and information. This will be great because it would quickly develop large audiences and then the media would have to do investigative reporting.
Pakistan is a large country. If Punjab province was an independent state, it would be the 13th largest country. Overall Pakistan is huge and among the top 10 largest digital markets. Therefore, AI is going to be used increasingly. We shouldn't worry too much about news agendas because they will shift after the new government comes in.
Haroon ur Rasheed Baloch: Is there space for this type of storytelling in Pakistan or do capacities and competencies gaps exist, how can they be plugged?
Adnan Rehmat: The present and future of Pakistani journalism like other places are digital. It's people like me who still buy newspapers out of habit. For other people, it's no more practical as you don't read a full newspaper. If you want information today, you can watch wise people on talk shows and the headline-only news bulletin. However, a lot of this will change. We see many newsrooms are now struggling. Also, we've seen the few dozen journalists who brought a lot of money to these television channels are no longer needed because of a change in trends. It's funny in one sense, but it's an indicator of how their time has come and gone. A trend came with a bang and disappeared in a few years. So, it is going to be digital, and secondly in a centralised country. We need to view the media landscape in a centralised way if the media's future is digital.
The next logical question is: are Pakistani political pluralism ethnic linguists going to be reflected in this changing shifting evolving morphing digital media landscape? The answer: not only will it happen it's already happening. For example, I currently work with the alliance of Pakistan called DigiMAP. We try to map what is happening in terms of digital journalism practice. Who were the new players? We decided that there would be no legacy players so we would not map TV channels or newspapers licensed by the state, only the independent ones and those who are doing information, not entertainment, and have a local audience. From a membership of 14 three years ago, it has gone up to 40 today and growing. Also, there’s a separate group and they do very interesting things, from opinions to analysis to news to user-generated content to self-generated original content. They do all kinds of media from video audio text multimedia, public interest journalism to public action journalism and so on and there is the most difficult thing to practice, a litmus test.
If we want to see how diverse and plural is this media, the litmus test would be what is the most difficult subject in Pakistan to write or report about. Of course, there are many like writing about the deep state but then you know that this makes for more public interest. So, it has got to be, let's say, writing about religious minorities because in terms of audiences they're small, but who wants to write about them and who is going to read about them? The problems they have read about in minority-owned independent digital media platforms. So, there’s an ecosystem within an ecosystem, from resource problems to specialism probably focusing on (let’s say) for example a specific local hyper-local community. They're talking to women, they're talking to communities, they're talking to ordinary people and they have all these interesting audiences that are small ranging from several thousand to hundreds of thousands, while some run into millions and so this means the need for public interest information will remain and everything that the state traditionally doesn't want you to talk about is up for discussion. The State and its pillars don’t want to talk. The judiciary, the military, the bureaucracy and the political forces don’t want to talk about their accountability. But what about other political forces, social forces and human rights movements e.g., the Pashtoon Tahafuz Movement and Aurat March and last but not least, the digital rights movement.
All the information about them and the community you will not find in the newspapers or on TV The state has failed to prevent an audience and these platforms from running this parallel media online so it means that the state cannot stop it and people will find alternative spaces and alternative digital communities. They will use AI to dodge the government they will use AI to frustrate the state and they will use AI to talk about their interests and the platforms that are managing these small operations will talk about this audience while the state will pretend it does not exist in the media. Eventually, everybody will have to concede to what people want, what consumers want because consumers of information are consumers of consumables and you will have to listen to them if you’re conventional media or corporate media, even. The advertisers will be forced to support operations that involve communities information operations you know formal news operations are not, that is a separate matter but it's about the people and the information they need and operations and platforms that provide the information they need or if they can’t provide then they have become consumers media is all about mediating interested information in the form of information and that’s happening in Pakistan
Haroon ur Rasheed Baloch: Do you see any space for digital journalism in Pakistan and what are the existing competencies of Pakistani journalists? Are they enough to respond to or meet the requirements of data journalism, and storytelling?
Adnan Rehmat: I think if you have the skills to make news you can do so in any form of journalism. It only must include data and extra pressure data that you know the public does not understand easily on the everyday basic figure but if the media is to be public interest journalism, then they look at the data and you know the government cannot hide the data anymore. The challenge has become a professional one: how to use and translate it into public interest information of public interest journalism and that both independent small-scale news operations and the conventional corporate media both phase is not just issues of resources, issue of priority and technical skills that their journalist must have.
It is inevitable that it will come to that, but I feel the conventional media will take leave there to start addressing some of these issues, but it will remain a challenge until you know we have a critical mass due to stories that link issues to people's interests. Till then budgetary figures will not matter. An example of this popular perception is that people look at the federal budget and say this percentage of the budget is for defence and this is for debt servicing but only PKR 24 billion is set aside for education. It is a fallacy that the federal education budget is just for the federal education infrastructure, the provinces have a separate budget and it's over, the country has over a trillion rupees so what the median is to do is see how much you know of that goes into non-brick and mortar infrastructure in Punjab, let’s say in Gujranwala district if that’s why the largest number of students are, and data journalism provides. This is an opportunity to convert that into a public interest issue that the government has to respond to. I think it’s inevitable that we will go there but until there are enough support groups available that will create let’s say at least 500 good journalists who understand that the journalism we need whether in state or private sector media is a critical mass of data journalists. For it to become mandatory for the rest of the media to then also follow suit, a few good journalists are not enough. You’re free to quote me on everything I have spoken about, as I don’t believe in fighting censorship and especially self-censorship.
There are a few other points I would like to make very briefly. One, I think AI is essentially how intelligence uses already available information. You know of the ChatGPT tool. It types all information available on the internet anywhere that it can access and use it. Humans can’t use it as quickly as ChatGPT. The question is who is developing this AI and are global south countries like ours involved in shaping how AI uses that information and so will it end up using let’s say overwhelmingly just not based information in whatever answers or analysis it generates? The media in Pakistan, South Asia, and China need to be talking about how that landscape is being shaped because it will affect us if chat GPT becomes the electronic version of the White man and gives whatever opinions they have issues about
Social groups but I think our media should be supported and invested in also understanding the influence of AI on media is not just you should be writing looks examining doing a paper to understand this better and reporting on this not just in Pakistan but you know whenever and the second, I think AI is essentially pre-label for newsrooms so media entities are going to use AI to generate information in conventional forms using as few people or journalists as necessary and the media industry will remain just as exploitative if it depends more on AI than human journalists. We need to find ways where human journalists become more professional and are also adequately compensated in terms of the capacities that they will then emerge with and be able to use. Using AI should become a proper skill set to ensure that journalism principles are met and accordingly you know they should be compensated in those terms. I think this is a conversation the media should be having. We don’t really want the ISPR (Department of Inter-Service Public Relations) to turn into a giant robot that expects that it only needs to send anything about the security domain and the media will just simply use that information. That used to happen when I was starting my journalism career in the late 1980s. The ISPR then used to send typed notes of news to be used with emerging quotes and emerging new sources. Now of course they do much more, like create bots and oppositely independent bots and they use university students to do the stuff. We should remember AI is here to help the human part of journalism. AI is here to help humans; humans are not here to help AI. We need to hold conversations that inform how AI should be welcomed in newsrooms not as a dictator of how journalism should be done but as data of public interest issues.
Haroon ur Rasheed Baloch: The discussion globally is that AI will threaten the jobs of journalists. Do you see this happening in Pakistan? Or will there be more jobs with AI’s advent in journalism?
Adnan Rehmat: The best use of AI in journalism will be to speed up the workflow process and make it more efficient but which AI is going to verify information from human sources should people on the ground will AI talk to people on the ground so we will need humans to talk to humans. AI can come up with good you know access to maybe online information sources that human journalists won't have but you know talking to people will always be done by humans and so journalism remains mustn't become, you know, Pakistani education contest where we have guide books to help to prepare for exams so we don't want guide book journalism we want to use AI in doing human journalism looking at applying human angle to it so, of course, a lot of when the online steer came then a lot of digital public publication meant that we didn't need you to know printing presses if people were going to read the newspaper on their phones so technology can help, there is no need to fight about that but we should be aware that job replacements will always be there and not just in journalism. This will always happen because technology is an extension of humans but where the story is that journalism is the story of humanity, that story should be written and told by humans, not AI. They can provide us with information, and quickly process information but the editor's job will not go to AI. We will need editors to make decisions whether the stories edit quickly, and human interest oriented or not, so we should worry too much as some jobs will be lost because journalism will change. The way journalism is conducted, produced and facilitated will also change and any technology that can help make journalism fit for those changes in times should be welcomed. But this should be an informed process, through dialogue and conversation driven and media stakeholders should be talking about these, and human rights sector should be talking with the media because they help each other, and this is how public interest agendas can be ensured by holding similar conversations.
Haroon ur Rasheed: Thank you Adnan Sahab for your time and participating in this important discussion. Hopefully, it will help the overall media stakeholders involved in the media landscape.
Watch the original interview here.
Adnan Rehmat is a Pakistani journalist, researcher and analyst with a background in media development and journalism. Haroon ur Rasheed Baloch is a digital rights researcher, academic and journalist based in Islamabad. Aisha Khan is a journalist in Pakistan, currently working as an intern at the Pakistan Research Institute for Sustainable Media (PRISM)