Gen. Musharraf is, of course, entitled to his opinions about the proper role of the military. If he believes in military dictatorship, for example, he has the right to say so. If the editorial staff of The News disagrees with Musharraf’s contentions, this is their right also and the proper place to publish their opinion is in an Editorial if it is the official position of the newspaper.

But to call someone ‘crazy’ is an attack on the character of the person and not the substance of his ideas. Furthermore, editorial comments do not belong on the front page of the newspaper in a news article. This changes the article in The News from a legitimate news source to a political attack. The News has already been corrected once by the Supreme Court for publishing inappropriate headlines. This practise needs to stop.

A page two column from Nawa-i-Waqt on Tuesday highlighted a claim that Jamaat ud Dawa “has made over 1 million suits for flood victims”. A staff reporter went on to report that JuD is providing milk packets to 7,000 children.

As shown in previous posts, this is a very small amount of aid to flood victims compared to that being organized and delivered by non-political NGOs as well as the government and military.

This blog has observed recently that some journalists, either unwittingly or for pay, appear to be providing PR for banned organizations. We have seen such examples in both English language and Urdu news media, including in The News (Jang), The Nation, Dawn, Daily Khabrian and now Nawa-i-Waqt.

Since Nawa-i-Waqt has also accepted advertising for banned groups, the question must be asked whether these illegal organizations are using advertising or PR methods to influence media coverage, or if the continued praise of illegal organizations reflects certain political bias by editors and reporters at these newspapers.

Ansar Abbasi reports that there is a conspiracy to change the contents of the report, and that the Education Minister Sardar Assef Ahmad Ali has sent the report back to HEC for editing.

Sources in the ministry confided to The News that the Education Minister Sardar Assef Ahmad Ali directed his secretary to ask the HEC chairman to withdraw the report and re-submit it with certain changes. The minister wanted the HEC chairman to delete the report’s portion mentioning the NA Committee on Education.

Following the minister’s direction, these sources said, the secretary education asked HEC Chairman Javed Leghari to withdraw the report and exclude from it the statement that the report should be forwarded to the NA Committee on Education.

But Sabir Shah writes in a different article that there is a conspiracy to bury the controversy by appointing a crony to cover it up.

It has also been learnt from the reliable sources that after meeting with the HEC chairman, Prime Minister Gilani held a detailed meeting with the education minister and Secretary Education Imtiaz Qazi in which they finalised the strategy to put the issue of fake degrees under the carpet.

According to the sources, the meeting remained focused on the ways to prolong and ultimately to do away with the issue of fake degrees of public representatives. However, Imtiaz Qazi denied having any knowledge about the meeting and the procedure to be followed in this regard. He also denied being present in the meeting. “I am not really aware about the whole issue. We are waiting for the in writing directives from the prime minister after which we would formulate our strategy,” he said.

According to the sources, nominating a minister for reviewing the process means that a single person would be handling the issue according to his own desire. “He would be accountable to nobody and there would not be any check over the process,” he said. Talking to The News, the Education Ministry spokesperson said that since the HEC comes under Education Ministry, therefore it could not communicate directly to parliamentary body.”

What makes these conflicting conspiracies especially interesting is that, according to Sabir Shah’s report, the report was not even delivered until late night.

The officials of Education Ministry did not receive any report in this regard till late night.

If the report was not delivered until late night, how did all of these people come up with so many conflicting conspiracies? And if there is some conspiracy, which is it?

In yet another article in the same day’s newspaper, Tariq Butt reports that there is a conspiracy to declare runners up as winners.

On the editorial page of the same newspaper, The News writes about a fourth conspiracy:

Going by what Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Babar Awan has said in an interview he gave to this newspaper, what may happen next is that the government could seek to promulgate new legislation, though the minister was vague as to its content. He said that there had been contact with several political parties (and that there was ‘documentary proof’ of this) seeking to lay the matter to rest. Their motivation for this will almost certainly be to protect politicians in the future from the withering blast of the media, as well as perhaps tightening their own internal selection procedures and criteria to ensure that those selected to represent us are less obviously liars and fakers. Considering his statement objectively, it does appear that the fake degree issue has given a severe jolt to those politicians who are self-serving and happy to deceive their electorates – who probably expect to be deceived anyway.

While it is disappointing that The News has such contempt for the people of Pakistan that it declares they “probably expect to be deceived anyway”, what is worse is that the editorial’s conspiracy theory contradicts what is reported elsewhere in the newspaper!

According to a report by Dilshad Azeem, the coalition partners have “rejected in plain words” any suggestion that they have been meeting to craft a law to protect fraud.

Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), Awami National Party (ANP) and Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam (Fazl), the three parties providing the numbers for survival of the coalition government, confirmed that neither the government consulted them nor they had approached the key functionaries on the fake degrees issue.

They dubbed the law minister’s assertion as totally out of context and against their respective stands, and said that those MPs, who gave wrong information about their respective education or any other matter, must be dealt in accordance with the law of the land.

It appears that, with no reliable source of information, The News is simply publishing anything and everything with the hope that ‘something sticks’. But this is not journalism, is only guessing and gossiping. Furthermore, it is impossible to not notice that every ‘guess’ published in the newspaper has a particular angle – the government is doing something wrong. Certainly no journalist should assume that everything is done without some discussion of how to make uncomfortable matters ‘go away’, but also no responsible journalist should assume that there is always some dark scheme at work.

Whether or not someone thinks that the degree issue even matters, everyone deserves to have facts – not conspiracies. The web of conspiracies in The News has become so tangled that reading the newspaper one reader can come away with many different and conflicting versions of events. That’s not news reporting, it’s just gossip.

Stratfor research does not support The Nation's claims

Only two days after their failed attempt to blame the government for problems at the Oil & Gas Development Company (OGDCL), The Nation’s editorial writers published a new hyper-dramatic editorial declaring that the US is targeting Pakistan. After reviewing the evidence used by The Nation as well as actually reading the news this morning, it has become obvious that The Nation failed once again to do their homework before they published a sensational – and misinformed – editorial.

The Nation’s editorial, “US targets Pakistan,” is based on a new article by the American think tank “Stratfor” titled “Annual Forecast 2010″ and is available for free by email. We were unsurprised to read the article and learn that it does not support the claims made by The Nation’s editorialists. Additionally, news reports today include new information from the American White House and American military chief Admiral Mike Mullen that directly contradict The Nation’s claims. Once again, The Nation has failed to do its homework.

To begin with, the think tank Stratfor is not part of the American government. Rather, according to their “About Us” page on their website, Stratfor is a private company that “provides an audience of decision-makers and sophisticated news consumers in the U.S. and around the world with unique insights into political, economic, and military developments.”

So, what does the US government and military say about plans to target Pakistan? Today’s Dawn reports that the Americans plan no direct military intervention in Pakistan.

The White House and the US military chief indicated on Wednesday that there would be no direct military intervention in countries like Pakistan or Yemen where Al Qaeda seemed to have established its bases.

…

“I’ve been to Pakistan one time before I took this job over, and I just made my 14th trip over the last couple of years just to give you an indication of the need to understand, the need to be there, the need to try to see challenges through other people’s eyes and not just take the American view from here in Washington,” he said.

This hardly sounds like the words of a military commander on the brink of invasion. Before The Nation decided that the Americans were knocking at Pakistan’s door, perhaps they should have rung them up to ask.

The original source of The Nation’s claims, however, is the Stratfor article titled, “Annual Forecast 2010.” We are publishing at the bottom of this piece the relevant portion in its entirety so that you may read and decide for yourself, but readers can also get the full paper for free by clicking here.

First, the Stratfor article does not say that the US is targeting Pakistan or that there will be a ground invasion of US troops into Pakistan, which The Nation’s editorial implies. What is says is that the military efforts being carried out in cooperation by US and Pakistani militaries may increase as more jihadis try to invade Pakistan while fleeing from Afghanistan, and that this would present some difficulties since the military efforts are unpopular already. In fact, the entire scenario is based on the US targeting Afghanistan with the Obama plan, not Pakistan.

Even The Nation says that this is the case in their own editorial:

“Officials in Pakistan also continue to express concern over the US troop surge in Afghanistan which they feel will not serve any meaningful purpose but will push more militants into Pakistan, thereby expanding the war further across the border into Pakistan’s FATA area.”

Which is it? Is the US secretly planning to target Pakistan? Or is the Obama plan going to increase the number of jihadis in FATA? The Nation’s logic makes no sense, and appears to be based on a predetermined political message rather than actual facts. The Nation says that “it now appears that the US intends to shift the centre of gravity of the war from Afghanistan to Pakistan,” but the Stratfor article that they provide as evidence says no such thing. The Nation’s editorialists have simply made this up.

Second, The Nation mischaracterizes the story as coming ‘in the wake of news that Americans in Pakistan are effectively operating outside of the law…’ This is simply not true. The article by Stratfor is clearly referring to the difficulty of anti-militant operations in Pakistan because both the US and the jihadis are unpopular: “U.S. efforts in Afghanistan (to say nothing of Pakistan) are already deeply unpopular.”

Third, The Nation also mischaracterizes what the Stratfor article says about relations with India. Unlike The Nation’s claim that Stratfor believes Pakistan’s assumed dependency on the US compels us to give in to American demands, the article actually clearly states that the US and Pakistan have their own interests and they both need to work in cooperation to find a way to engage with each other on fair terms. The Nation suggests that the US plan is to try to manipulate Pakistan, but the article they use as evidence says the exact opposite.

Fourth, The Nation says that “the US is aggravating the imbalance between Pakistan and India and actively encouraging the Indian leadership to up the hostile ante against Pakistan.” Their evidence for this is the recent statements by Indian military chief Gen. Deepak Kapoor. Perhaps The Nation staff does not know that Gen. Kapoor is not the American military chief and does not work for the Americans. In fact, The Nation’s allegation that Gen. Kapoor’s statements have any relation to America are simply conjured from thin air as there is no evidence of this at all. At this point, The Nation appears to be simply making things up for no reason.

The Nation concludes with the misleading assertion that “US aggressive designs towards Pakistan are becoming increasingly covert.” Nothing in the Stratfor article referenced by The Nation supports this claim. Actually, quite the opposite. The article quoted by The Nation calls for greater cooperation between US and Pakistani militaries.

Whatever your opinion about the current military and security situation in Pakistan, the fact is that The Nation’s editorial is once again not supported by the facts. Rather, it is simply a hodge-podge of unsupported conspiracy theories and make believe. Paranoid delusions might be entertaining, but they are not facts.

Perhaps The Nation thought that they could get away with this trickery because nobody would actually check their facts. They were wrong. A newspaper that claims to be “the most respected publication in English, with firm and constructive views, and excellent news coverage” should do a better job of getting their facts correct before they post alarmist and sensationalist editorials.

UPDATE: We received a request from Stratfor to remove the article that we had posted here as this is only supposed to be available to their membership. Actually, I think you can still get the full paper for free by clicking here. We recommend that you retrieve the paper directly from the Stratfor website so that you can read and judge for yourself.