Viewer Complaints to PEMRA

Since 2012 the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA), has made available the complaints it has received from citizens. As I'd already been looking for an excuse to practice scraping interesting data from unconventional sources I decided to take a look at the concerns of Pakistanis in this post.

A little background first; PEMRA is similar to the FCC in the US and much like the FCC it is charged with improving standards, access to and competitiveness in the communications industries. While it's domain extends to all electronic media only comments pertaining to TV channels are available online. Submitting a complaint requires filling a simple online form and providing a phone number. Since December 2011 a total of 122,056 complaints  have been filed with PEMRA. The ease of submission also means that a single complaint can be submitted multiple times or even be solicited from others.

The word-cloud below illustrates the content of a typical complaint and is constructed using the 5,711 complaints submitted since January of this year. This snapshot shows that most submissions politely ask PEMRA for bans and make references to Ramadan, controversial host Aamir Liaquat, religion and Geo among others.

Figure 1: PEMRA Complaints since January 2016

Looking at individual comments reveals the broad range of people's concerns. Naturally, many comments refer to commercials

"TV Commercial of Pain Relief Gel (Volatren Gel) , the girl with mini skirt was playing badminton ... its totally against our Ethics & Culture & Religion. Please be strict on vulgar commercial, kindly arrange a commission who will see commercial before it gets ON-AIR we are not against any product , but we must respect our culture we are Muslim."

and tv shows.

"They are showing a very OBJECTIONABLE program by the name of "GAME OF THRONES" This program is not even suitable for Adults. Almost like showing Porn. Please ask the operators to block this particular program."

Others are concerned with editorial decisions made by particular channels and shows.

"...1. It was really shocking to see a reporter lying inside the grave of Abdul Sattar Edhi. It is sheer third class way of getting the high ratings of channel. 2. I request to please stop these idiots from doing such shameless pieces of work. Regards ..."

"Nadia Khan on her show was too ridiculous while talking to Muhammad Aamir the Pakistani Cricketer. She should be banned."

and of course there are also those that are just confusing.

"Sir i am family man my 2 son and 1 daughter qmobile z12 adds very nonsense adds please adds to remove of all channel your see adds is not good adds thank you cartoon network hindi remove this good work of good timing decision pemra zindabad pakistan zindabad allahfiz pemra zindabad pakistan zindabad thank you"

Looking at the time-series of complaints since 2012 below, we see that complaints do tend to increase during the month of Ramadan (shaded bars) and that there is no real time trend in the number of complaints. We also see spikes in response to particular broadcasts. For example in April and May of 2014, Geo channels attracted close to 100,000 complaints following the shooting of one of it's reporters.

Figure 2: PEMRA Complaints over time.

Figures 3 and 4 show the total number of complaints and complaints per viewer made against TV channels since 2012. While the more meaningful measure is the number of complaints per viewer I include the total number of complaints as reliable data on ratings is not readily available for all channels. I exclude those channels that received fewer than 20 complaints between 2012 and 2016.

Both figures show a similar picture with Geo and ARY channels attracting the highest number of complaints. In general, news channels draw the most complaints per viewer followed by entertainment and then all other channels.

Figure 3 - PEMRA Complaints by TV Channel

Figure 4 - PEMRA Complaints per Viewer

While not ground-breaking, I found this an interesting exercise in working with non-numeric data and web-scraping. The code used get data from PEMRA along with the 2016 comments are available on my github.