JOURNALISM was simply endearing once upon a time. Watched from a close distance, the guerrilla journalist, equally interested in news and people’s and media’s rights, would always be around in those days and so would be protests and stories about the problems his tribe was faced with under the oppressive Zia regime. Then there would be a group which went under the generic title of ‘Jamaatias’, each camp having fought their battles against the other through the decades without any confusion.

It was routine for a story which was rejected by the local paper to appear in a BBC bulletin. Frequently the weekly magazine where the infamous leftists worked would come out with blank pages. Often, the staff there would replace the objectionable bits of information about Gen Zia with equally cutting and very relevant snippets from the life and works of Zia’s contemporary, dictator Augusto Pinochet of Chile. That would be sufficient to make the point and generate a certain kind of thrill among readers, especially the young, impressionable ones who saw a certain permanent order to life in all those happenings around them.

Occasionally early-morning guests in police uniform would come knocking. They would take away the ‘erring’ journalist, but would be gentlemanly enough to leave behind their contacts with the journalist’s family — in case help was needed in an emergency.

Out of jail the journalist would be driven around in a Volkswagen painted a shocking orange by the CID spies designated to follow him. That was one good opportunity to go around as the agencies’ man, less exciting as compared to the life of today’s agent-journalist but safer in the face of a despot as the adversary.

Of course, this is too rosy a picture; of course, there were times when it was not this easy a ride. There were intimidation and threats, and the labelling as traitors was killing at times. In reaction, there was anger and resolve, and the place still had space for a shriek and a cry. The line was clear and the support to a cause was not qualified as it is today. And once there was a cause, others joined in — trade unions mostly — without the grand term ‘civil society’ doing the rounds in those days.

Those days of peace in journalism, or an illusion of it recorded in the mind of a very interested outsider, were to fade when the newsroom transformed itself from being a place of envy to a place of work. Some idols went out of the window right away, others were whittled away with time. Only a few survived close persistent scrutiny of the sceptics, many existed only conditionally.

This fall of the idol was only one part of the problem, the cause of greater anguish was the lack of direction, generally. Some, however, were clearer about what they were doing than others, and did a better job than others of wrapping it up in the only presentable banner available: professionalism.

In contrast to the journalists one had viewed and held in high esteem as an outsider, in contrast to the causes they championed or appeared to be championing at various points, a certain emptiness now prevailed. This was a paradox since there was plenty to write home about and there were so many opportunities, yet the work that emerged was disparate, failing to turn into a sum which would then go searching for a grand joint objective.

It was a workplace where long enduring friendships could still be formed but the ‘right to association’ was seldom claimed and asserted. The advent of money in the profession somehow made professional organisations or trade unions even more unnecessary. The focus shifted from the trade union to the press club whose significance was sustained and which grew mainly due to the press clubs’ role as provider of plots of land to the journalists.

This was something which lay light on the conscience. It was, with some argument, considered a privilege by right, something which restored equality in the ranks of the journalists and gave them a common purpose. But the collective which had nurtured journalists’ movement back in the 1960s and the 1970s was missing.

To simplify, this was because of a change in the thinking of those who worked in the newspaper — the new-wave journalists who had the freedoms but who could not use these freedoms to build a journalists’ collective. It was also because of the absence of the old trade unions outside the profession which had strengthened the journalists’ unions in the past years.

There would still be occasional campaigns and protests, at the call of the management of some media group, with the journalists’ associations following rather than leading. That is how it has been for the last few decades and this is what gives a hollow ring to all these passionate demands today for a journalists’ collective.

There are so many breaches within — between workers who owe their allegiance to one or another news production house, between the privileged heroes and the ‘extras’ sitting in the newsroom who complain that the changed industry has yet to put the right price on their hidden labour.

The unity that is so desperately sought would not come without the introduction of some kind of equality among the members of the proposed union. That will require work in the hidden areas occupied by those who claim to be the ‘real’ behind-the-scenes journalists. n

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.