Notes from a Pakistani Newsroom

The Personal

Generals belong in war rooms. They are not supposed to be seen in newsrooms.

In 2015, I had the unenviable distinction of being visited by a three star general of the Pakistan Army inside the newsroom of the Herald magazine where I was an editor at the time. He was unaccompanied and casually dressed. Politely and civilly, he suggested to me that a prospective cover story the Herald was working on be dropped because it was going to criticise the Pakistan Army at a time when it was grappling with a highly deadly challenge from religious terrorism. I explained to him that the Herald in no way wanted to undermine the fight against religious terrorism. It, instead, wanted to point out that an ongoing drive to build up the army’s image could easily undermine other institutions of the state. The drive – being carried out mostly through songs produced by the Inter-Services Public Relations, or ISPR, the army’s own public relations department, which the visiting general headed – could, I argued, put a single individual, the then army chief, above every institution including the army itself. He listened to me patiently and, after realising that it was impossible for him to have the story dropped, he said very gently that he would at least want the army’s point of view given due space in it. ¹

Three years later, in 2018, I was visited by a two star general in a different part of the same newsroom. He was accompanied by two juniors – a brigadier and a colonel. All three were in civilian clothes. The general turned a chair a little askew so that it did not face me directly. He sat in it and lit a thin cigarette and started talking – mostly past me. He said how the enemies of Pakistan had launched a multipronged attack against the state and why the news media should stand shoulder to shoulder with the armed forces to counter this attack. I tried to respond by saying that a watchful media was all the more needed in the situation that he had described so that people’s grievances could find an unsealed outlet – a sort of a safety valve – before turning into political or social catastrophes that the enemies of the state could then use to their advantage. He continued to blow cigarette smoke while I spoke. When I said who, in any case, cared about the Herald, an English language monthly magazine with an audience that constituted around 0.01% of Pakistan’s population, he looked at one of his juniors. As if on cue, the junior launched into explaining how the magazine wielded a strong influence among the well-read and the well-heeled. Sensing that both sides were unable to convince each other, we ended the meeting on a rather cold, if not an entirely hostile, note.

When the second general visited me, the Pakhtun Tahaffuz Movement, an outgrowth of a mainly Pakhtun student activist group, was holding public meetings across Pakistan. Its ostensible objective was to draw people’s attention towards what it alleged were excesses committed by the armed forces during antiterrorism operation in Pakhtun areas on the Pak–Afghan border. The general did not say a single word about the movement or its leaders. When I asked him whether the Herald could have ISPR’s views on an upcoming story on the Pakhtun Tahaffuz Movement, his junior dismissed the suggestion. The movement, he said, was too insignificant to warrant the army’s time and attention.

The story came out a few weeks later. Just as it hit newsstands, I received a call on my cell phone in my office. The person on the other side was one of the two junior officers who had accompanied the two star general during his visit to the Herald. He was livid over what he called the magazine’s misguided attempt to cover a subject that most other news organisations were already self-censoring. He said he would take me to a court of law where, he warned, it would be impossible for me to prove the contents of the story that included several firsthand accounts of people who claimed to be the victims of the army’s excesses. He also said he would talk to my employer, the Dawn Media Group, to ensure that the Herald did not make a similar mistake again.

In a mostly one-sided conversation, I argued that involving either a court or my employer was not how his complaint could be addressed. He could, I suggested, send a detailed response to the story that would be duly carried in the next edition of the magazine and also along with the digital version of the story whenever it came online.

He probably knew more than I did. A couple of days later, my boss called me for a meeting in his office. After agreeing that there was nothing wrong with the story, he added that the army saw it as an attempt to damage its image. He then informed me that everything to be published in the magazine then onwards needed his prior approval. If he could not somehow see the contents before printing, I was to run them by the finance director of our publishing house who was also present in our meeting. In July 2019, about 15 months later, I lost my job and the magazine was shut down.

The seeds of its closure were sown in October 2016 when the Dawn Media Group got embroiled in what is known as Dawn Leaks. Cyril Almeida, a staff writer of Dawn, the group’s flagship daily newspaper, filed a news story – something he did only rarely – to report that some civilian participants of a high profile meeting had strongly criticised the army and its intelligence agencies over their alleged support for some militant groups operating within Pakistan. The army retaliated strongly, accusing Almeida, Dawn and by extension everyone associated with the Dawn Media Group of conspiring against the state. ²

Soon afterwards, my boss told me in a one-on-one meeting that the Herald must not do any stories about the army. Incidentally, the magazine’s upcoming cover story then was on the increase in enforced disappearances in Balochistan province where the army was trying to secure the territory for the implementation of development projects related to the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The story was immediately replaced by something else and was published only several months later.

The Herald’s self-censorship of its contents became painfully invasive subsequently. The most egregious example of this was an order to omit a paragraph from the profile of Asma Jahangir, Pakistan’s best known human rights champion, which was being carried in a special August 2017 issue of the Herald to commemorate Pakistan’s 70-year anniversary. ³ The paragraph was not even about the present, but was a poignant and poetic description of the climate of fear that had been resisted by activists like Asma in the 1980s. The order to remove it – coming as it did from abroad where my boss was vacationing – reached me two days after the editorial staff had gone home having finishing the production of the magazine.

The Collective

In October 2019, Fazlur Rehman, the head of an Islamist political party, announced his intention to march to Islamabad along with his supporters to press for the removal of Prime Minister Imran Khan. To mobilise support for his march, he met many opposition leaders and addressed news media at the end of all those meetings. In the middle of that month, Geo News television stopped the live coverage of one such press conference after Rehman had spoken a few preliminary sentences. In an extraordinary and unparalleled move, a newscaster stated that the channel was unable to show the press conference because the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) had banned the live coverage of Rehman’s political activities. The ban, as a high court later ruled, was neither legal nor was it justifiable since Rehman was saying nothing that was not said before on live television. More significantly, the channel had not received any formal, written order to impose the ban. At least one news outlet later reported that the order was conveyed to television newsrooms through a Whatsapp message ostensibly sent out by a PEMRA official.

Something similar had happened when, in July 2019, the former President Asif Ali Zardari’s interview with a talk-show host working also at Geo News was stopped after a few minutes. Nobody issued or received a formal order for that. The same was exactly the case with the disruption around two weeks later of a television interview with Maryam Nawaz Sharif whose father Nawaz Sharif has been Pakistan’s prime minister three times (and is now sentenced for owning assets beyond his means).

A seemingly more complex method was applied, though with the same effect of censoring the voices of opposition politicians, when, at a press conference, Maryam presented a secretly recorded video of a judge who had convicted her father. Most channels did not show her live. Others showed a brief clip of her press conference. Meanwhile, others that aired it in full were later kept off the airwaves for days. Again, without any lawful and formal order.

Given these examples and numerous others like these, the extensive enforcement of censorship in Pakistan seems to have become a normal occurrence yet what makes it a strange phenomenon is the way it is being imposed: informally, through phone calls and Whatsapp messages. There is ample evidence to suggest that these informal decrees are mostly delivered indirectly through television owners and newspaper publishers who then use their administrative and financial leverage over their staff to implement these. In some other cases, such diktats are sent directly to newsrooms where the editorial staff, scared of losing their jobs, acts upon them without asking any questions. If and when any newsroom tries to circumvent these orders, local administrators and cable operators are instructed through informal channels to stop the circulation of its newspapers and to disrupt its television transmissions.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent entity that works to make journalism safe and free across the world, stated in its 2018 annual report ⁴ that there were at least 31 instances in Pakistan of disruption in the dissemination of news media content. The PEMRA had issued formal notices to journalists and talk-show hosts in only some of these instances although the courts later stayed the execution of all these notices, putting a question mark on their legality.

By most conventional accounts, the ongoing bout of censorship has its origin in the run up to the last general election held in July 2018. Television channels and newspapers are known to have been told by the powers that be how to report about each political party as Pakistan hurtled to those polls. The most prominent members of some previous governments – including the former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his brother and the former chief minister Shahbaz Sharif and the former President Asif Ali Zardari – were all facing charges of corruption at that time. Stories of their alleged misdeeds made news headlines on a daily basis. The election campaigns of their parties were only covered sporadically, while, at the same time, the party of Prime Minister Imran Khan was given as much air time and print space as it might have asked for to reach out to its prospective voters. ⁵

Hameed Haroon, the chief executive officer of the Dawn Media Group and the president of the All Pakistan Newspapers Society, noted in an opinion piece he wrote for Washington Post on 12 July 2018 ⁶ that ‘an unprecedented assault by the Pakistani military on the freedom of the press’ was well underway. He said this assault was ‘threatening our chances for free and fair elections’ and pointed out how ‘newspaper columnists have begun to complain that editors are dropping their articles’. He remarked that the simple ‘reason for the current assault’ was that certain forces ‘aim to prevent the media from providing independent coverage of the country’s central political issue – specifically, a deepening power struggle between the military and the civil authorities’.

Haroon wrote how Gul Bukhari, a media commentator regarded close to the top echelons of Nawaz Sharif’s party, went missing in Lahore in June 2018 for several hours. She later said she was taken away to an unknown destination as she was travelling to the office of a newspaper where she worked. She has stopped writing her regular column since then. In a second instance, Haroon reported, a ‘senior military official’ identified certain reporters, television talk-show hosts and social media activists ‘as enemies of national security’. This ‘led immediately to intense campaigns of harassment [against them] on social media’.

The third instance pertains to Talat Hussain, a renowned talk-show host. In mid-July 2018, he planned a live show from the streets of Lahore to cover a public reception for Nawaz Sharif who was flying back from London along with his daughter, Maryam, to face trial on corruption charges. The show never went on air. Later, according to Hussain, he was told by his employer, Geo News, to reduce the number of people working with him on his show. He claims to have resisted the move, resulting in an unceremonious end to his long television career.

Contrary to what these instances suggest, the outcome of the 2018 election, however central it might have been to the strategy of the powers that be, has been by no means the only – or even the most important – reason for silencing the news media. It all, in fact, began in early 2015, weeks after a deadly terrorist attack in an army-run school in Peshawar resulted in the death of around 140 students, teachers and other members of the school staff. The army immediately reinvigorated and intensified its already ongoing antiterrorism operations in areas along Pak–Afghan border (as well as in parts of Karachi and Balochistan province). It also made the parliament approve the institution of military courts for the summary trials of thousands of people detained under terrorism charges. Alongside these measures, ISPR launched a propaganda blitzkrieg through songs, television dramas and even films to brush up the army’s image as the only saviour of a state and a society in trouble. ⁷ Originally, the campaign was meant to show the army as a highly motivated professional force but soon, as its critics started pointing out that many of the terrorist outfits operating in Pakistan were indeed its own creation, the need emerged to also crack down on critical voices. By the time a change took place in the army’s – and ISPR’s – leadership around the end of 2016 and the start of 2017, it was desperate to seek a two-year extension in the tenure of military courts and uncritical media coverage to showcase its successes in the fight against religious terrorism.

Many politicians were reluctant to give the military courts an extension due to allegations of miscarriage of justice during their proceedings. The commentariat was also looking askance at some of the antiterrorism operations that had not just put severe restrictions on the movement of people living in the Pakhtun borderlands but also had elicited many complaints of serious human rights violations and large-scale collateral damage caused to civilian lives and properties. Rising cases of enforced disappearances and increasing frequency of extra-judicial killings of alleged militants had become a major concern for human rights activists back then. To maintain the army’s image as the protector and the guarantor of the state’s existence and survival, the public needed to be saved from exposure to these developments.

Subsequently, the security establishment’s sensitivities around any criticism have manifested themselves in several publicly known instances. In October 2019, immigration authorities did not allow Steven Butler, a coordinator of the Asia Programme at the Committee to Protect Journalists, to enter Pakistan after he landed in Lahore to talk about curbs on the freedom of expression in the country. ⁸ The same month, artist Adeela Sulaiman’s art installation on more than 400 extra-judicial killings allegedly committed by an army-backed police officer was dismantled in Karachi by men ostensibly belonging to a security agency.

The coverage of any public event critical of the army is now effectively banned – unsurprisingly without any formal or written orders – and the appearance of many dissident politicians and human rights activists in interviews and talk shows is strictly prohibited. In reality, the ban has been extended to all reporting and commentary that purports to talk about the army’s role in politics and other fields of civilian life as well as its track record in the battlefield.

The Historical

The news media in Pakistan has had a long history of being subjected to censorship. And, just as in the current scenario, this experience has often taken forms that fall way beyond the pale of laws put in place to regulate the news business. For instance, when Pervez Musharraf, an army chief who ruled Pakistan between 1999 and 2008, was miffed by the critical media coverage of his imposition of emergency rule in November 2007, he used his clout with a Gulf state where Geo News was based back then to stop the channel from beaming into Pakistan. The high court of Balochistan province, in a similar vein, invoked an antiterrorism law to impose censorship in 2011. ‘If the electronic media and the press publish propaganda reports out of fear and propagate the views of banned organisations, they are not acting as good and responsible journalists, but as mouthpieces for malicious and vile propaganda’, the court ruled. The ruling, according to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, was practically impossible to follow for many journalists ‘as militant groups threatened them with violence to ensure their statements and actions were reported’. According to the authors of the report, at least 11 cases have been registered against journalists for violating the court-mandated ban.

Much earlier, when Nawaz Sharif – during his second stint in power in 1997–1999 – had a falling out with Jang Group (which owns Pakistan’s largest circulating newspaper, daily Jang, and also runs the country’s most watched television channel, Geo News), he used tax laws, anticorruption statutes and legal provisions to combat terrorism against the group’s owner, its senior editors and journalists. Maleeha Lodhi, the then editor of Jang Group’s English-language daily The News International in Rawalpindi, was reported to have ‘received several anonymous phone calls threatening that she would be killed and that her house would be blown up’. ⁹

The military dictatorship headed by General Ziaul Haq between 1977 and 1988 was much worse. It arrested many journalists, often on charges unrelated to journalism. A military court ordered four of them to be flogged for trying to organise a political gathering. The Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s civilian government (1973–1977), too, used many quasi-legal and extra-legal measures to suppress the freedom of news outlets and journalists it did not like. In one memorable instance, daily Dawn’s then editor Altaf Gauhar was arrested from his house in a night raid on the allegation that contraband liquor and obscene literature were recovered from his possession.

Gauhar himself had been the architect of a highly repressive administrative mechanism when he worked as the information czar of another military dictator, Ayub Khan, in the early 1960s. The elaborate press advice and prepublication censorship system that he put in place, according to Zamir Niazi, the foremost chronicler of censorship in Pakistan, made Gauhar, ‘the virtual editor in chief of 1,597 dailies, weeklies, fortnightlies, monthlies and other periodicals’. He and regional information officers working under him had the sole right to decide ‘which story was to get full coverage and which was to be played down or totally ignored’. ¹⁰ Ayub Khan’s 1959 move to nationalise the Progressive Papers Limited – that published newspapers both in English and Urdu – was also made possible by martial law regulations and not by any press-related laws.

In the present circumstances too, as has been argued before, all kinds of suppressive tools are being deployed to silence the news media. In one recent case, a senior news editor at a television channel, Shahzeb Jilani, was booked under the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act that was passed in 2016 mainly to weed out online threats posed to the state and its institutions. His crime: criticising the army in a talk show appearance, and then, tweeting about it.

This does not mean that laws strictly applicable to news media have never been used to curtail the twin freedoms of information and expression. The infamous Press and Publications Ordinance was a handy tool for all types of government to ban media outlets between the late 1950s and the late 1980s when, finally, it started to lose relevance due to various technological, legal and political changes. Laws and regulations governing the distribution of newsprint (which, until the early 2000s, was imported exclusively by the government and was then distributed among news organisations), the granting of licenses for private radio stations and television channels and the government’s discretionary powers to place state-sector adverts in news media have been always used to arm-twist editors, newspaper publishers and broadcast organisations into submission.

The Commercial

When Prime Minister Imran Khan met with senior journalists in Islamabad in October 2019, he was asked about the ban on the live coverage of Fazlur Rehman’s political activities. Khan feigned ignorance. He has exhibited a similar lack of acknowledgement – or knowledge – of the state of media censorship in Pakistan on several other occasions, including during a joint press conference with American President Donald Trump. The fact, though, is that there is little that his government is doing directly to muzzle the news media. In fact, two of its moves to change the news media’s regulation mechanism have both been deferred, if not entirely binned. One pertained to an announcement by his government soon after it came into power that it will set up the Pakistan Media Regulatory Authority to bring all types of media – print, electronic and digital – under a single regulatory authority. The move generated such outrage that the government has all but shelved it. The second plan, made public in the middle of 2019 after a cabinet meeting, concerned the establishment of special tribunals to hear media-related cases. This, too, became instantly controversial and had to be put on the backburner.

The apparently successful opposition by media houses of all commercial stripes and journalists of all professional hues to these two moves raises an obvious question: Why is news media in Pakistan failing to fight off censorship?

At least a part of the answer lies in the fact that most news media outlets in Pakistan today are owned by business houses that have large commercial interests outside news. Even older media houses that once exclusively focused on the business of news are branching out into other sectors of the economy. Both Jang Group and Dawn Media Group, two of the oldest media houses in Pakistan, have toyed with the idea of setting up e-commerce platforms. They have also ventured into the entertainment industry and book publishing every now and then.

The expanding commercial interests of the owners of media houses expose them to the depredations of the forces that can help or hamper their businesses. These forces have such administrative and coercive powers at their beck and call – and an overriding influence on policy making to boot – that they can make and break businesses at will. In the case of news media, these two elements are used in tandem: The former to disrupt the dissemination of news content and the latter to halt the flow of the government’s advertising money to critical outlets (something that became a little too obvious when the incumbent administration revised advertising rates after the 2018 election to hurt the news outlets critical of its politics).

And then, there is another part of the answer. A simple ploy that the powers that be have successfully used to ensure that almost the whole of the news media in Pakistan surrender to their diktat is to encourage serious, and seemingly unbridgeable, differences among media owners and various groups of working journalists. When one media house comes under pressure from the powerful parts of the state, many others rush in to curry favour with the same powers in anticipation of reaping some commercial dividends. Just to cite one example, ARY News was allowed the highest tariff rate for all government advertisement in a December 2018 revision of these rates – allocating it more money than even the most-watched Pakistani channel, Geo News. ¹¹ The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists, a country-wide association of working journalists, too, is divided into at least three factions, and thus, has always failed to offer a united stance over threats to the physical and professional security of its members.

The result is that the acrimony among media houses and working journalists is too obvious to miss. ‘TV stations attack other media houses, accusing them of treason, being anti-Islam and being foreign agents,’ said an anonymous journalist based in Lahore in an August 2019 interview with Index on Censorship, an organisation working globally for the freedom of expression. ‘Those with dissenting opinions are called agents of anti-Pakistani sentiment [and] anti-Islam forces generally’, the journalist stated. Consequently, the media industry has become ‘completely divided’. ¹²

The cultivation and exploitation of such divisions is nothing new—nor is its rationale driven by a national security agenda. As early in Pakistan’s history as May 1949, several newspapers carried a joint editorial asking the government to take action against the Civil and Military Gazette, an English language daily published simultaneously from India and Pakistan. The newspaper had reported that the two countries were working together to settle their dispute over the state of Jammu and Kashmir. It later retracted the report as a result of Pakistan’s protest and also apologised for printing it. Its rivals, though, must have seen an opportunity for themselves in its troubles and ultimately managed to have the paper temporarily banned for six months. The Civil and Military Gazette never recovered from the blow and had to shut up shop soon afterwards. ¹³

That this happened just nine or so months after the death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, was an ominous development. The democratic republic he had envisaged in his famous 11 August 1947 speech had failed one of its earliest tests to uphold civil liberties and fundamental freedom. A state that should have protected the people’s right to express themselves instead usurped the same right in the name of national security. Unfortunately for the news media in Pakistan, this precedent set seven decades ago has continued to repeat itself with an alarming regularity ever since.