Our television panels expose a huge structural failure in how discourse surrounding policy and expertise is built, where TRP value and political theatre leave no room for technical expertise. It is rather unfortunate to see how partisan polarisation reduces systemic crises to mere competitive conflicts, while digital platforms undergo elite capture that replaces knowledge with a detached, insular conversation behind the screen.
To understand the discrepancy between the ground reality surrounding multi-systemic crises in Pakistan, such as climate disasters, macro-economic instability, lack of legislative reform and demographic pressures and the dabbling nature of public discourse surrounding them; we must dissect that the people who represent such scenarios and affected voices are often not the ones who have experienced it themselves nor do they possess the relevant knowledge regarding the specific challenge posed.
The public knowledge sphere, ranging from mainstream channels to YouTube podcasts, consists of commercialised broadcast systems that actively reject empirical technocratic input in order to increase engagement by inviting political rivals, retired generals or high-ranking bureaucrats who excel in their own disciplines but may produce an ‘epistemic vacuum’ due to an unrepresentative and detached view.
Structural Exclusions & Epistemic Capital
As Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital and epistemic authority would suggest, the right and glory to speak authoritatively on public policy, matters of public interest and so on are distributed among persons based on their socioeconomic background rather than field-specific expertise. In that, you will notice that everybody who is invited to talk shows, broadcasts, and mainstream media are high-profile individuals with rich cultural and socioeconomic capital, even if they have minimal knowledge of the issue at hand.
Within the Pakistani intellectual sphere, linguistic markers and credentials from Western-centric/hyper-elite domestic conduits function as the top-tier form of institutionalised cultural capital. Such a capital then produces a class-bound disposition which is a specific colonial habitus that views socioeconomic realities through neoliberal development models, hyper-individualistic rights frameworks or postmodern identity politics. Such a system then relies on the media, which routinely replaces specialised technocrats with well-spoken bureaucrats, retired military personnel, and partisan legal practitioners.
By omitting empirical, field-based data through design or privilege, the media commits epistemic violence. It silences the people who take into account the lived realities, ranging from the health officers, union council administrators, economists and policy analysts.
The Podcast Messiah
It is worth mentioning how alternative media initially promises an egalitarian democratisation of speech but instead gradually undergoes class-based stratification, inviting business owners to talk about climate, politicians to discuss female-centric issues, and so on and so forth, giving rise to a culture devoid of expertise but full of high-ranking individuals in society. It is also visible how there is a language and theory barrier where systemic detachment takes rise when domestic crises (such as absolute poverty, labour exploitation or climate displacement)
are filtered through Western policy frameworks, elitist jargon and abstract terminology, making the solutions inaccessible and unreachable to those whom it directly affects. The result of the discourse by this insular class is then seen in the treatment of such crises as aesthetic intellectual commodities, capitalising on suffering, gaps in the system, or inadequacy completely removed from the practical, legal, and institutional mechanisms of governance and grassroots survival.
Instances of Failures of Policy Formulation
Case I: 2022 Floods and Administrative Absence: The discourse surrounding climate catastrophe focused more on macroeconomic debt obligations or political dynamics while actively excluding engineers and local agrarian experts from architectural intervention. Case II: Economic Deficits and the IMF Loop: Lived example of how fiscal crises are debated as ethical or political failures (‘corruption narratives & pointing fingers’) rather than including economic experts and analysing fiscal trends objectively.
The systematic exclusion of grounded expertise from the public sphere has serious institutional consequences and reduces state governance to a perpetual cycle of reactive crisis management. The state apparatus experiences acute institutional atrophy through the substitution of empirical long-term planning with superfluous legislative band-aids and an existential dependence on short-term external financing, such as cyclical IMF bailouts. By persistently marginalising local domain experts, agricultural research officers, municipal health administrators, irrigation engineers, we effectively starve public bodies of technical memory and drive a brain drain of unprecedented scale as specialised human capital seeks institutional validation abroad.
Ultimately, the mainline political theatre and the alternative digital elitism work hand in glove as a two-tailed disenfranchisement: the former turns systemic crises into partisan entertainment, the latter reduces material suffering into insular, Eurocentric discourse. It is strategically imperative to structurally institutionalise technocratic expertise within decentralised administrative frameworks to decolonise and re-ground Pakistani public policy, to foster localised intellectual platforms that prioritise empirical, field-based knowledge over both media-driven theatre and elite academic abstractions.