How women are objectified in Pakistan's media

From a convent school to a mass communication degree

The episode opens with Fizza Jamal describing an educational path that was, by her own account, unremarkable on paper. She completed her matriculation through one board and her SSC through another, and she recalls that no teacher ever pushed her toward creative thinking. Essays were memorised, not written. “Yeh yaad kar lein” - just memorise this - was the instruction she heard repeatedly.

The real shift came at university. Fizza tells Muzamil that the privilege of an English-medium convent education only became visible to her when she arrived at a local university and encountered students from every kind of school background across Pakistan. She had never had to think about her English before; suddenly it was an asset. She had always known she wanted to study mass communication, and she applied only to that programme. When she got in, she says, it felt like the obvious next step rather than a victory.

A documentary, a scholarship, and the pull of production

During her undergraduate years Fizza made a documentary as part of an internship. She did not know at the time that it would be screened at a film festival, and she did not know that the screening would lead to a scholarship. That sequence - work done without expectation of reward, followed by an unexpected opening - shaped how she thinks about effort.

Muzamil draws out the detail that Fizza had always wanted to do something with a production house, to make material rather than simply report it. The scholarship and the festival recognition confirmed that instinct. She describes the experience as one of the most formative of her early career, not because of the recognition itself but because it showed her that the world was larger than the bubble she had grown up in.

Entering broadcast news and the first encounter with objectification

Fizza’s entry into television news was not planned as a long-term career. She describes being told, essentially, that there was space in the industry and that she could speak English - so she should come in. The implication was clear: the bar for a woman who was presentable and articulate was low enough that she could clear it without much effort on the industry’s part.

What she found inside was different from what that easy entry suggested. Fizza tells Muzamil about sitting in a selection panel where two older men on the panel were more interested in talking to each other than in hearing her. “Woh aapas mein lage hue hain” - they were absorbed in each other - while she was trying to contribute. When the recording ended, one of them made a remark to her that she describes as reducing her entirely to her appearance. She does not repeat the exact words, but the effect on her was immediate: “Mujhe waqai nahi pata tha main is layaq hi nahi hoon” - she genuinely began to wonder whether she was simply not good enough, rather than recognising that the problem was with the panel.

This is the first-hand experience she returns to throughout the conversation: the moment when an institution’s behaviour makes a woman doubt herself rather than the institution.

The mechanics of objectification on screen

Later in the discussion, Fizza becomes more specific about how objectification operates as a daily workplace practice in Pakistani broadcast news. It is not dramatic. It is administrative.

She describes being told that her clothing fit needed to be corrected before she went on air. She describes being told that her lipstick colour was wrong. She describes the logic that drives prime-time presentation: the audience is watching the screen, so the woman on screen must be managed - her appearance, her voice, her posture - as a product to be sold alongside the news itself. “Aapko khabar bechne ke liye kuch bhi” - you will do anything to sell the news - is how she frames the channel’s implicit demand.

Muzamil presses her on whether this is unique to Pakistan, and Fizza’s answer is measured. She does not claim it is only a Pakistani problem. But she is clear that in the specific environment she worked in, the feedback she received about her appearance was constant and the feedback she received about her journalism was rare.

The breaking-news voice and the sensationalism problem

One of the sharpest passages in the conversation concerns the culture of breaking news. Fizza describes being trained - or pressured - to deliver every story in a heightened, urgent voice. The louder and more alarmed the delivery, the more the story registers. She tells Muzamil that she found this impossible to sustain honestly: “Agar main itna ooncha boloon, studio se bahar awaaz aa rahi hogi” - if I speak that loudly, my voice will carry outside the studio.

But the problem she identifies is not just physical. It is ethical. She argues that when every story is delivered as breaking news, the audience loses the ability to distinguish between a murder and a parliamentary procedure. “Agar koi kharab khabar hai, aap usko sansani karke nahi doge” - if there is genuinely bad news, you should not sensationalise it. The constant alarm flattens everything into noise, and the audience, she says, ends up misinformed not because they were lied to but because they were never given the tools to calibrate what they were hearing.

She connects this to a broader argument about media’s responsibility: the job is to give people an accurate understanding of the world, not to keep them in a state of agitation.

The Urdu teleprompter and the moment she knew she had to leave

Fizza describes a specific, almost comic moment that crystallised her decision to leave broadcast news. She had been working in English-language news. Then she moved to a channel where the teleprompter was in Urdu. Her Urdu, she says without embarrassment, was not strong enough for live television. She would read the script and find herself inserting English words mid-sentence - “freestyle rap,” she calls it - because the Urdu simply was not there.

She received a show-cause notice. She was asked to explain herself. And she describes the panic of sitting in the studio afterwards, convinced she had said something factually wrong, only to be told by a colleague that the information was fine - the problem was the language. “Yeh wrong information nahi thi, yeh wrong language thi” - it was not wrong information, it was wrong language.

Muzamil notes that this moment, rather than breaking her, seems to have clarified something. Fizza agrees. She had already been accumulating evidence that the industry was not structured to let her do the work she actually wanted to do. The teleprompter incident was not the cause of her departure; it was the confirmation.

What she took away, and what she left behind

By the end of the conversation, Fizza is direct about the cost of staying too long in the wrong place. She tells Muzamil that the fear of leaving - of not having a salary, of disappointing family, of being seen as unstable - is exactly the mechanism that keeps people in careers that diminish them. “Main nahi chahti ke mujhe afsoos ho” - I do not want to carry regret - is how she puts it. Not the regret of having tried something and failed, but the regret of having not tried because she was afraid.

She is also clear that leaving broadcast news was not an impulsive decision, even though people labelled it that way. The label of impulsiveness, she argues, is applied to women who make career decisions that do not follow the expected script. A man who leaves a stable job to start something new is called brave. A woman who does the same is called unstable.

Fizza’s move into UX design - which she discusses briefly toward the end - is framed not as a rejection of storytelling but as a continuation of it. Design, she suggests, is another way of thinking about how people experience information. The skills she built in journalism, the attention to how a story lands, the awareness of what an audience actually needs rather than what a producer wants to give them - these transferred.

What did not transfer, and what she does not miss, is the daily negotiation over her appearance. “Woh mujhe us tarah se koi afsoos nahi hai” - she has no regret about leaving that behind.