Janet Cooke had conned one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world. The Washington Post‘s immediate reaction was to go on the defensive. How could it be that their star reporter was lying? Still, though, the newspaper investigated the claims and discovered that they were true. The newspaper publicly apologized and returned the award.

Geo is having a similar moment today. Perhaps their star reporter Hamid Mir is innocent, but there have been serious charges made and evidence is piling up. Like The Washington Post, Geo appears to be very defensive. At least outwardly, there is little sign that the news agency is investigating what are very serious charges. This is understandable, to a degree – Hamid Mir is not someone who just walked in off the street. He is a veteran reporter that has many accomplishments.

But Hamid Mir is also a person. And people make mistakes sometimes. Everyone does. In fact, it’s not unusual for respected news organizations to have these problems from time to time. Like Janet Cooke at The Washington Post, there was Jayson Blair at The New York Times also and there was Stephen Glass at The New Republic also. A movie was even made about the story of Stephen Glass:

All of these reporters were well liked. They were nice, intelligent people who got caught up in a web of mistakes that grew from out-of-control egos combined with the fact that they were working for some of the most respected news organizations in the world. They became Media Baboos in their own minds. They believed that whatever they said was true simply because they said it.

Jang and its various news agencies demand transparency and accountability from the government. This is a proper function of media in a democracy, and Jang has many excellent reporters who do their job very well. But in order to be a legitimate and respected check on government, a successful news organization must provide the same transparency and accountability itself. This is why it is so important for Jang’s news agencies to be seen as acting in pursuit of the truth, whatever that may be.

So far, Hamid Mir’s response to the allegations has been rather silly. First he told The Guardian that it was a conspiracy by a blog controlled by the Ambassador Husain Haqqani. Perhaps he later found out that the blog in question – Let Us Build Pakistan – has posted materials critical of Haqqani, as well as many other PPP officials, from time to time. He has not mentioned this claim since.

Actually, this is not the first time that Hamid Mir has attacked the blog as being part of some big conspiracy. As we have defended them in the past, Hamid Mir did not provide any facts or evidence at that time either. It seems that these bloggers are simply an easy target for Hamid Mir when he gets upset. I don’t know why he has such a vendatta against them.

This accusation against the blog highlights an important part of Hamid Mir’s problem. In order to find out that they had published some articles critical of Husain Haqqani, all I had to do was use Google. If bloggers can use Google to check and verify facts, surely someone like Hamid Mir should be able to do the same.

This is a deep problem that we have in the media – reporters who do not seem to feel that they are responsible for checking their facts. Many of our most famous journalists seem to believe that simply wishing for something to be true is enough. Jang is not the only organization with some journalists affected by this problem – far from it – but they have been under the microscope since the Hamid Mir case has come to light. This actually gives Jang a great opportunity to take a leadership role and speak out against the problem, setting an example for other news agencies.

The other major part of the response has been for some of Hamid Mir’s colleagues to cast some wide accusations about a conspiracy to silence Jang for criticizing the government. But many news organizations besides Jang are critical of the government. Journalists look at the government with a critical eye every day in Dawn, Daily Times, The Nation and on all the TV shows. This is part of their job. Some reporters do it very well, and are able to critically analyse any government without having a political agenda guide their work.

It is interesting to note that the reporters who are so loudly crying out about a conspiracy to silence them, are really only the very small number of reporters who seem to have such a hard time checking their facts and providing evidence for their claims. Everyone else – the reporters who do their work and write excellent articles for their agencies – seem to know that they have nothing to fear from an investigation into the Hamid Mir tapes.

Jang Group is in an unfortunate situation, and I feel quite a bit of sympathy for all of their publishers, editors, and reporters who do good, honest work. Accusations against a member of their staff hurt. But we do not have Media Baboos in this country. Jang Group is bigger than Hamid Mir. If he did nothing wrong, it will come out and everyone will move on. On the other hand, if it turns out that Hamid Mir made some mistakes – if he was caught up in a moment and got carried away – Jang will be doing the best for itself and the media industry as a whole if it shows that it did a full and complete investigation.

IN LATE AUGUST, a couple of weeks after a U.S. drone strike incinerated Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, the country’s most popular televised chat show, “Capital Talk,” hosted a panel to discuss national security. Among the guests was a squat, middle-aged woman with short black hair, streaked with silver dye, named Shireen Mazari. A defense analyst and public intellectual, Mazari is known for her hawkish nationalism–and deep suspicions of India and the United States. Her presence in the studio suggested that, despite the enormous threat her country faced from homegrown terrorists, the conversation that night wouldn’t center around Mehsud or the Pakistani Taliban.

Instead, over the course of the next half hour, the panel discussed reports that Blackwater, the North Carolina-based defense contractor that recently changed its name to Xe Services, was operating in Pakistan. Hamid Mir, the host of “Capital Talk,” showed video footage of Islamabad’s most expensive neighborhoods, featuring multi-story villas with high walls and satellite dishes. The homes looked like any other on the street. But red arrows, superimposed on the screen, pointed to allegedly incriminating electrical generators and surveillance cameras perched atop the walls. “American undercover people are coming,” Mazari said. “They are renting homes, and Blackwater is providing security, running death squads and assassination squads … It is an occupation, by default.”

Mazari’s hunt for American spies and undercover defense contractors was only getting started. In September, she was named editor of The Nation, an English-language daily often described as “Fox News in Pakistan.” (Earlier this year, one columnist dubbed Mazari the “Ann Coulter of Pakistan.”) Throughout the fall, The Nation has published multiple front-page stories on the location of new ”Blackwater dens” around Islamabad. It featured a news story last month titled “MYSTERIOUS US NATIONALS,” which described “two suspicious foreigners wandering in the guise of journalists … [who] seemingly belonged to the US spy agency CIA.” The proof? That they “were driven towards the US Consulate.” (The “mysterious US nationals” turned out to be an English freelance photographer and an Australian photographer who works for Getty.)

The low point, however, came a couple of weeks earlier, when The Nation fronted a story titled “JOURNALISTS AS SPIES IN FATA?”–a reference to Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas–that cited anonymous law enforcement sources accusing Matthew Rosenberg, an American correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, of working as a “chief operative” for the CIA, Blackwater, and the Mossad. “We put in a question mark,” said Mazari, referring to the punctuation at the end of the headline, when I asked her whether she realized she was endangering Rosenberg’s life. (Daniel Pearl, also a Journal reporter, was kidnapped in Karachi in early 2002, accused of being a CIA agent, and beheaded.)

In the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the United States and Pakistan are ostensibly on the same side. But, as the Obama administration prepares to pour tens of thousands of new troops into Afghanistan, it faces a daunting array of challenges from its allies in Islamabad. Perhaps none is as disturbing as the anti-Americanism that is being fueled by Pakistan’s mainstream media. In a twisted development, most Pakistanis now view the United States as their greatest threat and enemy, usurping a place that India seemed primed to occupy eternally. And Mazari, who holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, may represent the vanguard of a well-educated, English-speaking, secular elite increasingly charged with hypernationalism and antipathy toward the United States. Mixing fact with demagoguery, and sometimes outright fiction, she represents yet another obstacle to Washington’s war on the Taliban.

FOR MOST OF the past decade, Shireen Mazari wrote a regular column in The News, a popular English-language newspaper owned by the largest private media conglomerate in Pakistan. The country does not exactly have a free press–this fall, Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan in the bottom 10 percent of its Press Freedom Index, squeezed between Uzbekistan and Equatorial Guinea–but there is no shortage of dissenting opinions aired on any of the country’s myriad private TV channels. Over the past couple of years, much of the commentariat’s energy has gone into denouncing President Asif Ali Zardari and U.S. foreign policy. It’s an effort that Mazari, whose articles often criticize the country’s civilian leadership and breathlessly recount CIA plots to dismember Pakistan and seize its nuclear weapons, has played a large part in leading.

I first met Mazari in 2006, when I was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad (ISSI), a foreign ministry-funded think tank. She was the head of the institute, and I was in the country as a freelance journalist, but, at dinner parties, Mazari often introduced me as her “resident CIA agent”–a joke that’s never really funny and grew awfully uncomfortable over time. Eventually, in January 2008, I was expelled from Pakistan following months of reporting in Taliban-affected parts of the country. Last month, in a TV interview, Mazari said, “There is a history of American journalists misbehaving in Pakistan,” after which she mentioned my travels to supposedly off-limits regions and added, “Eventually, he had to be deported.”

Far from being on the fringes of Pakistani society, Mazari is something of an establishment figure. She was appointed director general of the institute by Pervez Musharraf’s government not long after the general seized power in an October 1999 coup. In subsequent years, Mazari says she enjoyed considerable influence within Musharraf’s circles, and those ties, combined with her writing, have led to charges that she is merely a pawn for Pakistan’s military and intelligence agencies, which remain critical of U.S. power and are critical of Zardari’s floundering attempts at governance. “It’s quite obvious that her views are in consonance with people in the agencies,” explained Arif Nizami, the former editor of The Nation, who led the paper from 1986 until this September, when Mazari took over. “She’s let loose by certain people in the agencies who would like to see the pot burning,” said an acquaintance of Mazari’s in Islamabad. “She’s just a mouthpiece.”

That doesn’t mean that Mazari’s charges are all without merit. There is, of course, a U.S. military and intelligence presence in Pakistan, and, two weeks ago, the New York-based liberal magazine The Nation–no relation to its Pakistani namesake–published a lengthy article alleging the activities of Xe/Blackwater in Pakistan on behalf of the U.S. military. Xe and the U.S. government deny the charges, but, when I spoke with Mazari soon after, she said, “I certainly feel vindicated.” She later added, “Our interests and the Americans’ interests don’t coincide.”

During Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to Pakistan, the secretary of state spent much time arguing that U.S. and Pakistani interests did, in fact, coincide. To a cynical questioner who believed that Pakistan was fighting America’s war, Clinton replied, “We have a common enemy.” Indeed, in the past six months alone, the Pakistani Taliban has exploded bombs in Islamabad; attacked police and military sites in Punjab; overrun the Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi; and bombed sites throughout Peshawar. More than 400 people have been killed in terrorist attacks since October. Behind closed doors, senior Pakistani leaders seem to realize the threat, which is why Islamabad accepts U.S. anti-terrorism efforts, silently condoning the drone strikes, for example, while condemning them for public effect. Mazari’s objections–like those of many other Pakistanis–are certainly understandable, but the reckless, oftentimes unsubstantiated way in which Mazari presents them only deepens the so-called “trust deficit” between the two countries.

In August, for example, Mazari wrote that an American citizen named Craig Davis had been arrested in Peshawar and deported because of his alleged ties to Creative Associates, a government contractor that she dubbed the “central organization” for U.S.-funded “suspicious, covert operations” in Pakistan. “Clearly there is a threatening US agenda seeking out our nuclear sites and assassinating people, thereby adding to our chaos and violence,” she continued. Weeks later, she wrote that Davis was back in the country. The U.S. Embassy objected to the story, and The News’s editorial-page editor went back and fact-checked the column. Some of Mazari’s assertions–Davis had not, in fact, been deported–didn’t check out. So, before her next column ran, the editor opted to hold the piece an extra day and show it to a lawyer. In the interim, Mazari announced that she was taking the job as editor of The Nation, though not before accusing the U.S. ambassador, Anne Patterson, of interfering with Pakistan’s free press. (It wasn’t the first time Mazari had accused the Americans of disrupting her career. When the Pakistan People’s Party won elections in 2008, they promptly removed her from her position at the ISSI, a development for which she also blamed Patterson.)

Mazari and The Nation, though smaller than The News, were a perfect fit; The Nation’s publisher has advocated nuking India and is also noted for his conspiracy-mongering. Since taking over, Mazari claims that the paper has been “seeing a big revival,” with circulation having “jumped up tremendously.” According to both Pakistanis and Pakistan-watchers, The Nation has become a right-wing outlet like Fox News. But Hamid Mir, the host of “Capital Talk,” cautioned against making the comparison–for fear of it becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. “The Nation is not very big and not very influential,” he said. “If The Nation becomes Fox News, then Pakistan will burn.”

Already, the Taliban have seized on the propaganda opportunity that Mazari has opened. When a bomb ripped through a Peshawar market in late October, killing more than 100 people, the Taliban, increasingly concerned about alienating the Pakistani public, refused to take credit for the blast. Instead, Mehsud’s successor, the Fu Manchu-styled Hakimullah Mehsud, blamed Blackwater. If that line becomes accepted, then not only will Pakistan continue to burn, but the U.S.-Pakistan relationship may burn along with it.

By Nicholas Schmidle, Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of TO LIVE OR TO PERISH FOREVER: TWO TUMULTUOUS YEARS IN PAKISTAN.

In a satirical piece on Pakistan’s “New Media Dictionary,” Nadeem F. Paracha described “conspiracy theory” as “a theory that is not a theory at all but a hard fact on Pakistan’s TV channels,” where anything goes and where 90 percent of Pakistanis get their news.

For America’s television coloratura of right and left, the modus operandi is to mold rather than inform. In Pakistan, they do more than mold – they fake it. The overwhelming majority of Pakistanis believe Sept. 11, 2001, was the work of two co-conspirators – Mossad and the CIA.

The broadcasts of World War II’s Tokyo Rose were tame compared to some of the outpourings on Pakistani’s 50 TV channels. And “anyone disagreeing with the hard and loud factoids,” Mr. Paracha adds, “is a Mossad/CIA/RAW [Indian] … agent and a possible swine flu carrier who would be lined up against the walls of Delhi’s Red Fort and shot dead during Ghazwa-ul Hind in 2012″ – the year of the forecast conquest of India by Muslims, which is also the year of a growing pile of apocalyptic warnings and anxieties about the end of the 5,125-year Mayan calendar. Armageddon is around the corner.

It is bad enough that conspiracy theorists and yellow journalists are creating distractions and confusion within Pakistan. But the fact that they continue to be a source of international embarrassment is confounding. Have these so-called journalists no shame? Where is the “Ghairat Lobby” when you need them?

Thanks to a tip from a dear reader we have been informed that there is a new article coming out in the American magazine The New Republic about Nation editor Shireen Mazari in which the author calls her “The Ann Coulter of Pakistan” and speaks at length about her paranoid delusions and yellow journalism. The article is written by Mr. Nicholas Schmidle, an international journalist who has written a book about the two years that he lived in Pakistan as a journalism fellow and now lives in America and is a fellow at the think tank New America Foundation.

Our dear reader included a link to a blog post by Michael Crowley, a journalist for The New Republic, that discusses Mr. Schmidle’s coming article and the state of media in Pakistan generally:

At the heart of this problem is the anti-Americanism and conspiracy-mongering of Pakistan’s media, which I saw first-hand when I read through a large stack of local papers at the embassy. So I was glad to find on my return to Washington this week that the latest print issue of TNR features a really top-notch article by Nicholas Schmindle about Shireen Mazari, a Pakistani journalist who’s been dubbed “the Anne Coulter of Pakistan,” and who has been responsible for countless stories like the one that recently speculated about whether a Wall Street Journal reporter in the country is actually a CIA spy, potentially endangering his life. When I was Islamabad, one newspaper (I believe it was Mazari’s The Nation, which is generally the worst offender) ran a story which included the wacko claim, attributed to Seymour Hersh, that a “death squad” backed by Dick Cheney was behind the 2007 assassination of Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto as well as the 2005 murder of Lebanese prime minister Raffik Hariri. (It seems this nutty rumor has been floating around since at least May, even though Hersh himself has publicly denied saying such a thing) In Islamabad, American officials told us about another story that identified–complete with photograph–a building in the city purportedly housing workers for the security contractor Xe (nee Blackwater). In fact, the building was home to Western aid workers–at least until they fled to safer environs that same day. 

Stories like this fan the rising flames of anti-Americanism in Islamabad. A reporter traveling with me had hoped to meet a colleague at a coffee shop in central Islamabad, until embassy workers warned him that the shop was known to be under surveillance by people who might like to kidnap a Westerner. One embassy official told me that he enjoys dining out at Islamabad’s restaurants–but when pressed admitted that he never lingers for coffee and dessert. “You try to be out within an hour,” he said. (The same goes for activities like grocery shopping.) The Pakistani media surely also contributes to the growing harassment of U.S. embassy officials, who are finding their visas inexplicably denied and their vehicles pointlessly searched at security checkpoints around the city.  So it’s understandable that the vibe within the embassy compound–a deceptively bucolic place of walking paths and tennis courts that seems more college campus than  embattled diplomatic outpost–feels so tense. After all, even behind the barricades and razor wire safety is not guaranteed. We all remember the 1979 storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. But less remembered is the way an angry mob overran and torched our embassy in Islamabad that same year. One U.S. Marine was killed, and it was a miracle that dozens more American lives weren’t lost. (As Steve Coll recounts in his masterful book Ghost Wars, the Pakistani government barely lifted a finger to help.)

The cause of that deadly riot? False Pakistani media reports that the U.S. had orchestrated an attack on Mecca. Lies have consequences–sometimes deadly ones.

I will be waiting with great anticipation to see this article, as I am certain, is Shireen Mazari herself. A quick search of The Nation‘s website only found one mention of Mr. Schmidle in which he is referred to as “an expert on the Afghanistan-Pakistan region for the non-partisan New America Foundation.” I’m sure Mazari will have a new title for him once the article is released.

In the meantime, it is quite disappointing that Pakistan’s media is being discussed with such negative tones in the rest of the world. We have Shireen Mazari and her band of paranoid conspiracy theorists and media Talibans to thank for this. As the author Mr. Crowley correctly says, “Lies have consequences.” When Pakistan’s media talking heads spread lies and gossip instead of proper reporting, it not only sets our country on a wrong path, it makes us look foolish to the rest of the world.

If any of our dear readers have a copy of the article by Mr. Schmidle or any other tips, please send an email to us at pakistanmediawatch@gmail.com and we will be most appreciative of your assistance.