According to “The American Press Institute” the purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to make the best possible decisions about their lives, their communities, their societies, and their governments. We may add or subtract the roles and purposes but the core remains the same, to educate and inform the masses in a way that they can build a progressive and peaceful society.
Rajab proposed in Gulf news that media production across all its forms has the most significant impact on the behavior of the individual and society, and it is the main source for the formation of public opinion. The most critical factor important for security and stability in any society is a community awareness that can be achieved through multiple means, the most important of which is the media in its various forms and shapes,” she said on Sunday evening as she addressed a gathering of media professionals in Kuwait.
Passion plays and pageants remind us that in the broadest sense of the term, reenactment is not new. The recent spate of "reality"-type reenactment programs like 1900 House, Regency House, and The Ship has examples in "docudramas" such as the PBS production An American Family (1973) and MTV's Real World, launched during the early 1990s. Alexander Cook and Katie King, contributing to this volume, point out that such programs also share structural similarities with observational film and hence often have an experimental character. While reenactment seems widespread in the United States as well as Britain and other countries. A cultural phenomenon whose link to the individualist. Reenactment is a global phenomenon not necessarily confined to historical events nor even to factual ones. Reenactment often verges close to fantasy role-playing in its elastic appropriation of both the real and imagined past. Indeed, there is a general discrepancy between the mandate of reenactment bringing the people to history and those same people's dislocation from the reenacted past. As historian Stephen Gapps fruitfully asks, "Why would Australians or anyone else want to reenact overseas history so remote from their own experience?" This anomaly suggests that reenactment performs political and cultural work that is quite distinct from more conventional forms of historiography. Even while reenactment claims to give voice to marginalized positions, those subject positions do not necessarily correlate to reenactment's constituency in the present; postcolonials might, for example, reenact the colonial past (as colonial masters or subjects) but might just as readily choose an entirely unrelated theme such as World War II or the Dark Ages.
Television is a medium of information. In this research the effects of the television on the population were studied. Television is a graphic medium incorporated with encoding techniques having no counterparts in the real world and is used to produce streams of constantly changing images. It also has the ability of producing special effects such as camera cuts, slow motion techniques, accompanying music, unusual sounds, cries, noises and faceless narrators in unique and innovative ways. Since this source of media, has the ability to produce a variety of multimedia content, it is capable of changing an individual’s insight to reality. Bruni and Stance (2006) defined television as an important agent of socialization, which defines the society and determines its goals. Moreover, Shrum (2005) reported that regular awareness of TV use and its content build perceptions of societal realities. This includes the occurring of material comfort that could mislead and might influence the means that spectators reflect upon themselves and the society. Due to such an influential role, it can be inferred that television produces powerful effects on health, interpersonal relationships, social religious and cultural beliefs as well as the values of the society including individual behaviours.
Jack Breslin (2005) established that some crime shown on television makes it more attractive. For example, in a single bank office, an armed robbery by a vicious gunman can be more compelling a story than the loan officer who is quietly embezzling millions from behind a desk for a decade. Both are serious crimes against society, punishable by severe sentences, but it makes TV more entertaining than other mediums. ' (, America’s Most Wanted, 162)
Looking back over the history of crime shows on television, the roots of the current "reality-based" cop shows are evident. NBC's 1936-1957 radio show Gangbusters, was made into a television show in the early 1950s. "As in the radio Gangbusters, the episodes were primitive docudramas, ‘taken from actual police and FBI files.’" (David Marc, Demographic Vistas, 73). At the end of each show a photograph of someone from the Most Wanted list was shown asking anyone knowing the whereabouts of the suspect to phone the local police, the FBI or Gangbusters. The television version lasted only 18 months and was cancelled because of the popularity of Dragnet, with which it had been alternating every other week. Dragnet, produced by Jack Webb, was critically acclaimed as television's first "realistic" cop show and was the first to win an Emmy. It lasted from the 1951-52 season until 1958-59. Its hallmark was this supposed realism, with its cases, like those of Gangbusters, taken from actual police files. The hero of Dragnet, Sergeant Joe Friday, provided a "relentless crime fighting consciousness" that "left little room for sympathy for the twisted vermin who opposed the public order."(Marc, 75) The show constantly reminded viewers of the reality of what they were watching. "What you are about to see is true..." Dragnet's view of the world in general and crime in particular was a paranoid one where the forces of evil were constantly held at bay only by the relentless efforts of men like Joe Friday.
Here in Pakistan everything seems to be going in opposite direction and against the current. Media, contradicting with its intrinsic purpose, and is treading the wrong path and doing everything against the book. But what premise led to this chaotic situation; commercial interests and lack of proper journalism training be it technical or ethical. Pakistan electronic media mushroomed during General Pervaiz Musharraf (retd) regime at a time when very few journalists knew the tricks of trade and were naïve to this new medium. Print media journos switched to the new media which offered them good prospects. This apathy continued down the line and content of channels lacked ethics and moral values. A new genre of programming evolved during the past years is crime and reenactment.