Starving Watchdogs

Pakistan’s media also draws a comparatively small, but significant, amount of revenue from ads from government departments (typically concerning vacancies, project tenders, and campaigns) – from 2013-17 this averaged $26.5 million annually. This is at odds with the adversarial relationship the press often has with Pakistan’s government, as well as its powerful military.

In 2007, when then dictator General Pervez Musharraf deposed the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, it was the media that rallied the people against him. The government blacked out media coverage and imposed a state of emergency in the country, but this failed, resulting in Musharraf’s ouster. In April 2014, Geo Television, the country’s largest private TV channel accused the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence’s chief of ordering the assassination of its leading anchorman, Hamid Mir. In 2016, the English language newspaper, Dawn, published a story detailing a National Security Council meeting in which the civilian leadership told the army to move decisively against militants to prevent Pakistan from becoming internationally isolated. The “Dawn Leaks,” as they came to be known, caused a national crisis, as the opposition party branded them as an attempt to weaken the army. When counter terrorism personnel dubbed some people terrorists and killed them in front of their young children in the Sahiwal area of Punjab province in January, it was the local media that showed that the family was on its way to a wedding, and had nothing to do with terrorism.

Indeed, Pakistan’s media has a long tradition of resistance to military dictatorship. All Pakistan’s military dictators clashed with the media, with Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who ruled as Pakistan’s president from 1978-88, even having journalists publicly flogged. Under him, editors used to leave blank spaces on newspaper pages to protest censorship.

In recent years, though, there have been signs of either government pressure on the press, or self-censorship by the management or owners of media companies to ingratiate themselves with the government. In April 2018, Mosharraf Zaidi, a prominent commentator, accused The News International of censorship. “For the first time in over a decade, @thenews_intl has refused to publish my column,” he tweeted, also posting the rejected column. “This unnecessary muzzling of debate is not healthy. Strong nations cultivate robust debate. Weak ones fear it. Pakistan is stronger than it is being allowed to be.” Shortly after, Najam Sethi, another prominent journalist, said his show on GEO News had been taken off the air, and that Jang, Pakistan’s biggest media group, had stopped printing his column. “But its [sic] not their fault,” he tweeted. “They have been muzzled.” In January, Cyril Almeida, the reporter responsible for the Dawn Leaks, and one of the country’s most popular commentators, suddenly ended his weekly column without explanation. Other prominent anchorpeople have also been taken off the air, and many columnists have claimed that newspapers have refused to publish their articles on topics deemed “sensitive” by the military.

Getting reliable and comprehensive information on this trend is difficult. Not a single media outlet has publicly disclosed the number of layoffs and pay cuts it’s made, and there seems to be an omerta amongst media companies keeping them from talking about each other. The media companies themselves are owned by powerful and secretive families or media barons – the Jang group by the Rehmans, the Express group by the Lakhanis, the Nawai Waqt group by the Nizamis, Dunya News by Mian Amer Mahmood – who seem to make it their policy never to disclose what they’re doing, nor to report what’s happening to the others in the industry. Iqbal Khattak, Pakistani representative of Reporters Without Borders and executive director of Freedom Network, a Pakistani civil society organization, says the failure of these families and media barons to reinvest the past earnings from these businesses has hampered the ability of the industry to absorb the recent financial shock.

Khattak also says that the poverty of the country as a whole also means that only a fraction of the population is capable of helping to sustain the press. “40% of the country is on the verge of [the] poverty line, while 40% is below this line, and you have only 20% to look towards to sustain yourself,” he says.