“Don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology,
Don’t know much about the science book, don’t know much about the French I took…”

THIS is an old song, which seems to be an apt description of journalists — especially in Pakistan. Over the decades, the profession has moved on from print to television and now digital but our training remains rooted in old-fashioned ‘generalism’ (if there’s such a word). As with the bureaucrats who run petroleum one day and health the other, we journalists move from commenting on foreign affairs one evening to the economy and healthcare the next. The notion of specialising in issues or studying them in depth is as alien to us as democracy is to Islamabad’s neighbours.

Perhaps this is why most in the profession rarely bother with reading and books. Take history — even of Pakistan. Those of us who entered the field at the time of newspapers learnt the country’s history through oral tradition. Late-night chats with senior colleagues, who had survived martial laws and newsroom working hours, told us of tumultuous times such as war, secession and dictatorship. They included those who remembered what it was like working during the censorship of Ziaul Haq’s times, the night Pervez Musharraf removed the government or when an operation was first launched against the MQM in Karachi. The oral history we learnt alongside copy editing was the best counter-narrative to the whitewashed account taught in school books under Pakistan Studies. Our daastango provided us with a fun but patchy........

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