By Ariba Shahid
W
hy would you buy a television channel in Pakistan? More specifically, why would you buy a news channel in Pakistan? Even more specifically, what would convince a real estate tycoon and a Senior Minister in the ruling party to want to spend Rs3.5 billion of his hard earned money on a television channel that has been making massive losses for years? The latest reports from the world of news media are strongly indicating that the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Senior Minister in the Punjab Government, Aleem Khan, is in the process of buying Samaa TV. And while both the management of Samma and Aleem Khan have declined to comment on the matter, employees at the television channel have revealed that layoffs, structural changes, and revisions in HR policy are already underway to pave the way for new management. So why would Aleem Khan, or anyone for that matter, want to buy a television channel? With the state of the industry and censorship, it cannot possibly be a love for
MEDIA
journalism. With ad revenues down and the digital medium gaining more traction by the day, the profit motive is definitely out of the question. Even if you were to not consider the censorship aspect, and even if you made a big splash and have a lot of resources, chances are that if you started a news channel tomorrow you would be much more likely to bleed out money and fail than you are to make even a small profit. Yet Aleem Khan is more than interested, and he is not the only one. The reason is that with the possession of a television news channel comes influence. Say, for example, you are a businessman like Aleem Khan that also has political interests. If there is a story breaking about you or your business in a newspaper or on a different channel, all you have to do is mobilize the journalists that work for your channel to tell another version of the story. Anyone that doesn’t comply can be terminated, and everyone will listen because you pay their salaries.
It is a neat little solution, and one that happens far too frequently. Just last week, Profit reported on how personal the reporting of the news can get with the example of a feud between Bol News and a private company over politics at an elite Karachi school. And if Aleem Khan does manage to buy Samaa it will mean a bit of a shakeup in the Pakistani news industry. According to a recent Gallup poll, Samaa is the seventh most watched news channel in Pakistan, behind Geo News and ARY but well ahead of Dunya news. Discounting PTV and only looking at private, national, Urdu news channels, Samaa comes in at number 5, reaching 7% of the national population with 883,000 watchers reached daily. To get the most out of his investment, Aleem Khan will be looking to try and get those numbers as high as possible. He will also be trying to cut his losses as much as possible, and one of the most sure fire ways to do both those things are layoffs and sensationalism. The downside is the death of quality journalism. Profit takes you through the ins and outs of buying a news television channel in Pakistan, and why it might be a good idea despite the cost.
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