LONDON: For a time, Pakistan’s journalists were seen as
messy champions of democracy: brave if sometimes flawed truth-tellers who
helped oust the military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf and held up a critical
mirror to their tempestuous country.
But a vicious gun attack last weekend on Hamid Mir, the
country’s most famous television newscaster, seems to have changed everything,
setting off a divisive media battle in which the truth itself has become bitterly
contested.
At issue are claims aired by Geo News, Mr. Mir’s employer
and the largest station, that the military’s powerful spy agency, the
Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, was behind the April 19 attack in
which Mr. Mir was shot six times as he traveled to a Karachi television studio.
Even staunch ISI critics thought the station’s personalized
attacks, which singled out the ISI spy chief as the culprit, were hasty and
premature, especially at a time when Islamist militants were also targeting reporters.
But rival stations took the controversy a step further,
using it to cudgel Geo and question Mr. Mir’s motives — one station even
suggested he engineered the shooting as a publicity stunt — at a time when the
ISI was formally trying to have Geo shut down for good.
The vituperative exchanges have exposed troubling aspects of
Pakistan’s oft-lauded media revolution: Along with the military’s concerted
campaign to muzzle the press is the heavy hand of querulous media barons who,
driven by commercial concerns and personal grudges, may be endangering the
sector they helped create.
“The way this has played out is extremely disturbing,” said
Zaffar Abbas, editor of Dawn newspaper, one of the few media outlets that have
stayed out of the dispute. “I’ve never seen the media like this, really going
after one other. If better sense doesn’t prevail, whatever we have earned in
press freedom will be lost.”
The stakes are high on all sides. Since 2007, when
television coverage played a key role in fanning the street protests that led
to the ouster of General Musharraf, the news media has grown into a powerful
factor in Pakistani society. Television news has widened public debate and
exposed abuses, but it has faced sharp criticism for shoddy reporting and for
giving a platform to Islamist extremists.
The exploding market has also turned prime-time talk show
hosts like Mr. Mir into powerful figures, and made fortunes for a handful of
newly minted media tycoons.
For reporters, however, it has been a perilous time: Some 34
journalists have died in the line of duty since democracy was restored in 2008,
said Mustafa Qadri of Amnesty International, whose report on media freedom is
due to be published April 30.
“It is supremely dangerous to be a reporter in Pakistan,” he
said.
The military, in particular, has squirmed under the media’s
relentless scrutiny. Tensions have been bubbling for some time between the Jang
Group, the country’s largest media conglomerate, and the ISI. Jang is owned by
Mir Shakil ur-Rehman, a reclusive editor who lives with his two wives in Dubai,
where he keeps a tight grip on a media empire that includes Geo News, several
sports and entertainment channels, and a stable of newspapers in Urdu and
English.
Last fall, Mr. Rehman came to believe that the ISI was sponsoring
a new television station, Bol, to dilute his commercial and political clout.
His newspapers ran hostile reports about Bol, prompting competing media
organizations to hit back with stories that painted Geo as sympathetic to
Pakistan’s old rival, India.
Senior figures at Geo claimed the spat had put their lives
in danger. In November, Mr. Rehman’s son Ibrahim, who is chief executive of
Geo, said he had received warnings of an attack by “the ISI or one of their
proxies.” Mr. Mir claimed the ISI tried to lure him away from the station, and
had threatened his life.
The tensions erupted publicly after last weekend’s attack on
Mr. Mir. His brother, Amir Mir, who is also a journalist, accused the ISI of
orchestrating the shooting in an emotional denunciation that was broadcast for
hours on Geo, often against a backdrop of a photo of the ISI director general,
Gen. Zaheer ul-Islam.
The ISI leadership, stung by the unusually open challenge,
reacted angrily. On Tuesday, the military leadership sought to have Geo shut
down and its editors prosecuted for “a libelous and scandalous” campaign that
it said violated the country’s media law. On Thursday, television viewers in
major cities found that Geo had disappeared from its usual position on their
cable television sets. And on Friday, posters appeared across central Islamabad
that praised the ISI and carried glossy photos of the spy chief, General Islam,
a first in a country where many citizens fear to say the letters ISI out loud.
Few doubt the ISI, which has a dismal record of attacks on
the press, is capable of such an attack. The spy agency’s media cell, infamous
among journalists, is known to bribe select journalists with money, vehicles or
other inducements. Critical reporters have been subjected to harassment,
abduction and torture. In May 2011 the body of an investigative reporter,
Saleem Shahzad, was found in a canal south of Islamabad after he was abducted
by presumed ISI agents.
But other groups are also targeting journalists, in
particular the Pakistani Taliban and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, the dominant
political party in Karachi, according to Amnesty International. Both of those
groups have infiltrated Geo.
In 2012, the militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi recruited a junior
reporter at Geo to help plan the assassination of a news editor and a prominent
talk show host at the station, said a former Geo manager with direct knowledge
of the case. The plot was foiled when the reporter confessed.
A second Geo employee was identified as a militant after the
Taliban assault on Karachi’s Mehran naval base in June 2011, the former manager
said. The station also believes that insider information played a role in the
death of Wali Khan Babar, a Geo reporter who was killed by the M.Q.M. in 2010,
a current Geo manager said.
The controversy over Mr. Mir’s shooting is unlikely to be
resolved. In the past two decades, Pakistan’s courts have produced convictions
in just two fatal attacks on journalists: Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal
reporter killed in 2002, and Mr. Babar, the Geo reporter.
“Even if we discover who pulled the trigger on Hamid Mir,”
said Mr. Qadri of Amnesty, “it’s very unlikely that the people behind them will
be found out.”
Unlike in the Musharraf era, when journalists united against
military attempts to muzzle them, virulent rivalries between the businessmen
who own the major stations have pulled the news media apart.
Mr. Rehman of the Jang group has a rancorous relationship
with Sultan Lakhani, who owns the smaller Express media group, which includes a
television station and several newspapers. (One of those papers, the
English-language Express Tribune, prints The International New York Times in
Pakistan.) A third station, ARY, is owned by a family of gold dealers that has
little love for Mr. Rehman.
“The control of the owners and their say in what happens has
increased tremendously,” said one editor, speaking on the condition of
anonymity. “No editor or journalist can take a stand against them.”
The turmoil has partly obscured the plight of Mr. Mir, who
has an ambiguous history with the ISI. He shot to prominence after interviewing
Osama bin Laden in 1998, and was initially seen as sympathetic to the
pro-jihadi agenda of the Pakistani military and the ISI. But in recent years he
has championed the cause of Baluch nationalists, angering the army, and
highlighted human rights abuses during military operations.
He is now under close protection at a Karachi hospital,
where flowers are piled outside his door and doctors report a steady recovery.
In a statement issued through his brother, Mr. Mir vowed to “continue the fight
for the rights of people till my last breath and last drop of blood.”
Other journalists, however, worry that something greater is
at stake: Pakistan’s hard-won press freedoms. The furor over Mr. Mir’s shooting
could result not only in the closing of Geo, but also in greater restrictions
on the entire media.
“A lot of us liberals feel a dilemma,” said Abbas Nasir, a
former editor at the BBC and Dawn newspaper. “We’re disgusted with the way Geo
has behaved in recent years. But we also know the consequences of letting the
boots shut down the media. And that’s got to be the bottom line.”
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