Continuing its trend of publishing opinion pieces in place of news reports, The News on Monday took up almost the entire page 5 of the National News section with various opinion pieces. Ali Moeen Nawazish wrote his opinion about the importance of respecting mothers, and ‘Our Correspondent’ wrote that PPP has been outsmarted by PML-N […]
The Supreme Court on Tuesday adjourned its hearing on former Ambassador Husain Haqqani’s plea to be given the same opportunity to respond via video link as his accuser, the American businessman Mansoor Ijaz. When it did so, the Court issued some decision. What you believe that decision may depends on where you get your news. […]
Zoha Waseem is not a household name. She doesn’t have her own talk show on Geo, her face is not the center point of full colour ads run in daily newspapers, and she doesn’t spend her days molding the opinions of the masses with a regular column in one of our many daily newspapers. But […]
Is the government corrupt? Which department is most corrupt? How much of your answer to these questions is based on hard facts, and how much is based on what you’ve been told by the media? On 25th December, in a report titled, ‘Military stands at number five among corrupt institutions’, The News reporter Usman Manzoor wrote […]
This has been a bad year for Muhammad Saleh Zaafir. The ‘Editor Special Reporting’ of Jang Group has been publishing one article after another of especially poor quality. In January, Muhammad Saleh Zaafir wrote a bizarre conspiracy theory suggesting that President Zardari held a ‘mysterious meeting’ with President Obama, despite the fact that details of […]
In The Nation on Tuesday, Dr Farooq Hassan asks ‘Who authorised the drone attacks?’. According to the senior advocate of Supreme Court, the two obvious suspects are President and PM. But it seems that Dr Hassan is overlooking some important research on the subject. In March, you might remember, General Officer Commanding 7-Division Maj-Gen Ghayur […]
Farah Zia provides an excellent review of the way media handled the ‘memogate’ story as it broke. Now that the Supreme Court has begun hearing petitions on the case, it becomes even more important that media play its role of reporting facts and not intentionally or unintentionally influencing the outcome – an act that would […]
It is unfortunately more common that our reports examine inappropriate and unprofessional behaviour by our respected journalists. Occasionally, however, there are moments that make us proud to be associated with the profession and we do like to recognise these as well. After a week of media circuses, we are pleased to be able to once […]
It has been one year since the media caused a national crisis by inaccurately reporting that the government was plotting to withdraw notification to reinstate the judges sacked by Musharraf. Unfortunately, it seems that journalists and TV anchors did not learn from this ‘moment of shame’ and are once again causing alarm by rushing to […]
We have written before about the problem of an unquestioning media either intentionally or unintentionally presenting information as facts that is actually carefully managed propaganda. This comes in many forms, from reporters embedded with intelligence agencies, to analysts picking and choosing evidence to support a predetermined conclusion. to journalists simply repeating what they are told […]