Television Broadcasting

Television

GEO NEWS

Introduction:

GEO, the first South Asian Urdu language channel to provide content comparable with world-class television broadcasters was established in May 2002. Geo is the fastest growing TV Channel in Pakistan with ratings exceeding all satellite delivered TV channels in the market.

Owned by the Jung Group, Geo mainly caters the B class whereas their print media, the newspaper Inkalab is for the C and D class people, primarily truck and rickshaw drivers who are more interested in the looking at entertaining pictures and useless piece of news which will never make it to the headlines on the mainstream media. E.g., a donkey cart owner punching a police driver, scandals related to Meera, advertisements and pictures of Punjabi movies, etc.

Licenses Issued By the PEMRA:

There are two types of Broadcasting Licenses which Geo has.

Satellite TV License: Available to transmit within Pakistan and across.

Landing right License: Geo Super has this license for 4 years in order to be shown in Pakistan, as it is owned by someone in Dubai. They pay $500 a day to the Pakistani government for continuous transmission. But recently they have been banned by PEMRA and that’s one controversy on its own.

Success rate:

-Only two channels so far in Pakistan targeted the A class but they failed because only 3.9% is A class in Pakistan who prefer international news channel like BBC and CNN over local English news channel. Dawn News English which shut down and Express News English who are hoping for Geo news to take over but they are highly mistaken because Geo news will not.

-They are efficient in reaching their destination in catastrophes. They make sure they send a back-up too. In the Air Blue crash they sent 6 satellite vans as back-up to ensure competency.

-In case of some wrong data or some major human error during a news bulletin, Geo try to rectify but in certain cases, there’s only 22 minute influence time in telecasting media after which the populace forgets the wrong information.

Target Audience:

Normally they target public figures, actors and actresses and bring their private life in the spotlight. Because according to the survey and research done by Geo, even international news channel follow the same criteria and scrutinize ever angle of public figures and prey on them.

And similarly on Saturday April 22 2011, instead of airing their most favorite show "Hum sab ummeed say hain", Geo cancelled the show and started covering the death of Pakistan’s most famous comedian cum actor, Moin Akhtar. To them and their audience, the death report was more significant to broadcast than 'Hum sab ummeed say hain'.

Pays Cost Of Bluntness:

With their candid attitude, Geo get threat calls from various government officials too. Recently, Geo received a call from government representative to stop the director of 'Hum sab ummeed say hain' to shoot the mimicry of the Chinese Prime Minister.

HUM Television Network:

Origin:

The idea of introducing an amalgamation of entertainment and enlightenment led to the formation of this channel. The head Sultana Siddiqui noticed the dearth of appropriate and original entertainment, and thus began the process initiation of a new channel. 'The aim was to revive the genuine Pakistani drama and to merge modernity with our own cultural values' (Nayyer Rubab-creative head HUM television)

Ownership:

Group of people hold the reins, it is actually a public limited organization and its stocks can be freely bought and sold at the Stock Exchange.

Transmission:

HUM TV is shown across the globe by the African beam and the UK/Us beam respectively. The first transmits signals to the African countries while the latter reaches North America, England and the adjoining areas.

Goal:

As underlined by Mrs. Sultana Siddiqui, the creative head of hum television, the role of Hum and what it has been trying to pursue includes, ''illuminating social issues like forced marriages, feudalism, illiteracy, drug abuse, and sexual harassment effectively". As mentioned above, the idea behind most dramas is to educate the public and create awareness.

Codes and conventions:

Television has become a significant part of almost everyone’s lives and reaches more people than any other socializing institution. This has led, however, to a common belief that television is an activity that requires little or no skill, and understanding it is an intrinsic quality, embedded in us from birth. That’s where we are all wrong. We have to learn the codes and conventions of the medium, in order to understand it and benefit from it, similar to learning to read or speak a verbal language.

Codes are collections or groupings of signs, [which construct and represent meaning]. Conventions are the ‘rules’ which organize signs into a code, and produce meaning through encoding and decoding. (Lealand & Martin, 2001)

Level of codes:

As with all the television genres which exist, News and Current Affairs are distinguished by:

Level One Code: Reality

All television content is already constructed (encoded) by social codes, which include appearance, dress, speech, accent etc. News personnel (reporters, presenters) are customarily around thirty, well-groomed, well-spoken and well-educated.

Level Two Code: Representation

Social codes are further encoded by technical codes, such as camera angles, lighting, editing. These codes, in turn, transmit the conventional representational codes which shape and determine the structure and meaning of narrative, action, character. As in the authoritative news presenter addressing us directly, explaining events within 50-60 second ‘news stories’, in an atmosphere of importance and urgency.

Level Three code: Ideology

Social codes, technical codes and conventional representational codes are organized (by convention) into ideological codes (familiar, socially acceptable codes) of individualism, national interest, gender, race and class, power relationships etc

For example: An ideological assumption determines what is ’news’-- a focus on the 52 people killed in the London bombings, rather than the estimated 25,000+ killed in Iraq; language choice determines our responses to events e.g. suicide bombers rather than martyrs.

Role Being Exercised By the Broadcasting Sector:

From the arranged meetings with the media personnel and learning the fundamentals from them, we can deduce substantially if not plenty.

1.       First, we realized that broadcasting sector does enjoy influence for the fact that it encompasses and translates most of all the thoughts, notions, propositions, and guidelines for betterment in to entertainment programs. These programs have these contextual messages implicitly evident within them, to be perceived by those who can determine.

2.       Secondly, even when the general perception that we get of radio is that it is not listened to with as much keenness and interest as before. this was proved as just a presumption because one of the people we met at FM 103 ( nicknamed Billoo bhai and fiqa), actually told us that their channel has been banned thrice already and PEMRA justified that by deeming their content to be 'provocative, inciting, unfiltered and anti-government'.

3.       Even as we consider the television, we all notice that channels like Geo news, Express have faced a ban and withdrawal of licensor ship in the past. The ban was imposed on the reasoning that these channels were going out of their way to analyze the events taking place in the political sphere. The bans have lasted for a number of days, until finally PEMRA was forced to reissue them licenses.

Transparency:

Questions regarding recruitment of employees were readily answered by the radio heads and they unhesitant told us that deployment is done purely on the basis of skill, talent, and the ability to engage the audience and physical appearance plays almost minimal role in it. When asked the same of the people in the television sector, they carefully avoided that question, even though, the creative head of Hum television, was insistent that 'deployment is purely skill based'. 

References:

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Broadcasting: definition. As cited in http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/broadcasting.html

The debate over Federal funding. Retrieved from http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=aHYPERLINK

Information about PTV. Retrieved from http://www.forumpakistan.com/information-about-ptv-tHYPERLINK

Public Broadcasting. Retrieved from www.congressionaldigestdebates.com

Noam Chomsky- Saying what 'Media don't want us to hear'. Retrieved from http://www.fair.org/media-beat/011206.html

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http://www.christianradiohome.com/comm-noncomm.asp

Katie Harris (2002), ‘Is Television Like a Language Which We Read? Retrieved from