The extremely tragic assassination attempt on Hamid Mir is the worst demonstration of how forces within the country are trying to stifle freedom of speech. What is equally disturbing is that Geo and Hamid’s family members immediately reacted by accusing the involvement of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in it. Although discretion demanded that even if they had reasons to believe
The attacks on Raza Rumi and Hamid Mir speak volumes for the risks embedded in being an analyst or an anchorperson in Pakistan. The accusing finger is pointed at various potential attackers or conspirators ranging from the Taliban to the intelligence agencies. However, there is another side of the picture. Rumi is a prolific writer and analyst but he took
The shooting of the high profile journalist and TV personality Hamid Mir on Saturday, led as it rightly should have, to a frenzy in the media. The news channel, Geo News, to which Mir belongs was the frontrunner in reporting after the incident. In a country where the narrative on democracy is newly maturing, the symbolism of an attack on
If there is a bomb blast, there will be two kinds of people running towards the bombsite rather than away from it: the police and the media. Both have lost their lives due to the nature of their jobs. While the Pakistani police are still unsung and uncared for, the dangers to the Pakistani media we keep reading and hearing
Four months after the US-led attack on Afghanistan, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted in Karachi and beheaded. That was only the first of a large number of murders of journalists we were to see in the coming years. Till a few years ago, no one in the Pakistani media could believe that a journalist’s handcuffed and tortured
By: Ejaz Haider The cabinet-less Balochistan government, as effective as a blindfolded man walking down a busy highway, decided this week to lodge a First Information Report against a private TV channel for airing a video of how the self-styled Balochistan Liberation Army goons destroyed the Quaid’s Residency in Ziarat. But this isn’t all. The police officer who registered the
By: Ijaz Kakakhel ISLAMABAD: PPP-led opposition parties in the Senate on Tuesday protested over the registration of an FIR against a private TV channel and staged a walk out from the House. At the beginning of Upper House’s proceedings, Opposition Leader in the Senate Aitzaz Ahsan said that although opposition has reservations on the conduct of media, it stands by
By: Zaair Hussain I had been considering writing on this topic for a while, but I foolishly believed it to be ‘trivial’ or ‘unimportant’, or even ‘so incredibly stupid that my brain hurt to dwell on it for more than a moment’. But our elected leadership and our guardians of justice have managed to open my stubborn eyes. If they
The Right to Information (RTI) Ordinance is the first major accomplishment of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)-led coalition government in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P). The only such law in the country, the RTI paves the way for a more transparent and vibrant democracy where citizens have access to all government documents and can monitor the expenditure of their taxes. The ordinance calls for
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