Pakistan: Urdu-language press bearing the brunt of the censorship while English-language media are ignored

Sun Nov 11 17:39:48 UTC 2007

Press leash tightens
 TheStar.com - News - Press leash tightens

Chaos could aid terrorists: U.S.

WASHINGTON–The turmoil in Pakistan could undermine the battle against
insurgents, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said yesterday.

"The concern I have is that the longer the internal problems continue,
the more distracted the Pakistani army and security services will be
in terms of the internal situation rather than focusing on the
terrorist threat in the frontier area," Gates told reporters while
flying home from a week-long visit to Asia.

As President Pervez Musharraf's chief international backer, the Bush
administration says it is deeply concerned about the deteriorating
situation in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation of 160 million people
that is on the front lines of the U.S.-led campaign against terrorist
groups.

The chaotic situation could leave Islamist militants even stronger,
analysts say.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Associated PressJournalists are scrambling to find ways around the
Pakistani government's crackdown on press freedom as they cover the
events of emergency rule, but the stories they read in their papers
bear little resemblance to the ones they wrote

November 10, 2007
Mitch Potter
Toronto Star

ISLAMABAD–In a country that prides itself on a lively media, if not
quite a free one, Pakistan's new rules of silence can be deafening.

Many of the print and television journalists are scrambling to find
ways around the draconian edicts on what can and cannot be reported in
the context of emergency rule imposed one week ago by embattled
President Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Urdu-language print outlets have, in many ways, borne the brunt of the
crackdown, according to several reporters who shared their
frustrations yesterday at the riot police ramparts outside opposition
leader Benazir Bhutto's home in a tony district of Islamabad.

"I come out to these things but I feel like I am suffocating," one
young print reporter from an Urdu-language daily told the Toronto Star
after describing the severe edits made by his editors night after
night.

Said another reporter for an Urdu daily: "We thought somehow we were
past all of this, that we had broken into the beginning of a new era.
Especially the young reporters, who have had so much freedom compared
to what the older ones remember.

"But on a day like this, when you see the whole capital full of
roadblocks, you really have to wonder. I don't think this could happen
without some kind of support from the outside world."

Government censors have not taken residence in the newsroom, he said,
but the looming threat that a publication will be shut down ensures
compliance to bar any and all criticism, "other than what we can write
between the lines.

"When tomorrow's paper comes there are two possibilities. Either I
won't recognize my story or I won't see it at all," said the reporter,
who asked not to be identified.

"This government says it is against the Taliban.

"But the way they have taped our mouths shut, the way they are sitting
on our eyes, feels like something the Taliban would do."

Yet the government-ordered media blackout has also prompted a wave of
electronic acrobatics, with news-gatherers and news junkies finding
other ways to connect.

Among the most aggressive in the news pack is GEO TV, which has
managed to deliver many of its forbidden reports to Pakistani eyes by
feeding the footage secretly to the United Arab Emirates and having it
bounce back within minutes via satellite or the Internet, thanks to
newly created online video streams.

The jungle drums pound louder still through mobile phone text messages
loaded with the lasted banned news.

Still, with Internet penetration touching barely 5 million of
Pakistan's 160 million people, it would seem the vast majority remain
largely in the dark about the political situation – a gap into which
endless streams of rumour, conjecture and conspiracy theories now run
rampant.

GEO TV stands as the most popular among some 20 independent TV
stations that began hitting the airwaves in 2002, ironically as a
direct consequence of reforms brought forward by Musharraf himself.

Until he came to power in a bloodless coup in 1999, dreary state-run
Pakistan TV was the only one to watch. And in the more benign days of
the president's rule, as Pakistan was opened up to a dizzying wave of
independent broadcasts, Musharraf boasted that the newly won freedoms
comprised an essential element of his broader policy of "enlightened
moderation."

Musharraf's media glasnost came with strings attached, including a
desire for the newly created outlets to emphasize a "soft image" of
Pakistan – code for curbs on media stories that might reflect badly on
the country.

The pressure has always been greater on the mass circulation Urdu
language press than it is on the English-language papers and magazines
that serve a small but elite audience widely seen as depoliticized.

Pakistani journalists also cite the entry of Pakistan into the
U.S.-led war on terror as the trigger for setbacks that led to scores
of journalists being harassed, arrested and detained – and in some
cases, killed – for reporting from the country's volatile tribal
areas.

The tenacity of GEO TV, however, reflects the fragile confidence that
has taken hold of the Pakistani media since the broadcast revolution,
which has opened the airwaves to a new generation of journalists, many
of whom are willing to take ever-greater risks while working to
uncover Pakistan's many dangerous stories.

But with risk, pain sometimes follows. GEO TV and AAJ TV both
sustained attacks on their premises earlier this year in the wake of
aggressively open news coverage. In GEO's case, the attackers were the
Punjab police, dispatched by unnamed officials after the station aired
live coverage of clashes between police and lawyers supporting
Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, the independent-minded chief justice who
was removed from his post following Musharraf's state of emergency.

Yesterday, in the wake of the new emergency decree, dozens of
baton-wielding police could be found ringing the offices of GEO TV
opposite parliament.

"They're not here for our protection," quipped Mir, a 20-year news
veteran, who for the first time in his career has guards at his office
and at home.

He didn't want his full name used.

"We're trying to survive on an hourly basis, not day-to-day or weekly,
because we don't know when they will storm in and arrest me."

http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/275291

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