Bad press handling in Sindh
Editorial
The incident at the Sindh Governor’s House which led to the decision by the All Pakistan Newspapers Society and Council of Pakistan Newspaper Editors to instruct all member publications to boycott the coverage of Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz’s press conference and activities in Karachi on August 22 was unfortunate and totally unavoidable. While official apologies have been made, as they should have been, one must look into why the incident happened in the first place and how such a distasteful occurrence can be avoided in the future.
The whole thing started unnecessarily. Editors and reporters were invited to the Governor’s House for a press conference and when they reached the venue, a Governor’s House official asked the editors to vacate the front rows which he said were reserved for senior government officials even though earlier another official had escorted the editors to be seated in the front row. Upon this, the editors pointed out that it was a media event and they (editors and reporters) had been invited to it. This entitled them to the front row. However, this official was rude and the editors and reporters decided to walk out.
There are two questions here. The normal procedure is that editors are normally invited separately and exclusively to meet with the president or the prime minister or the chief minister or governor. They are not at such events for note-taking which is the job of the reporters. If, however, someone at the Governor’s House had decided to invite editors and reporters, then the editors should have been seated in the front row. Secondly, it is somewhat perplexing that a petty bureaucrat should have chosen to act in the way he did and not know the protocol. We call the rude official a “petty bureaucrat” on the basis of the apology extended by Salahuddin Haider, Sindh advisor for information. Mr Haider’s statement said the “mishandling” of journalists was a “lower level mistake”.
We accept that the incident was “totally unintentional”, but clearly there is need to ensure that all concerned officials understand the protocol and no one is driving in a different lane like the churlish retired military official at the Governor’s House. In trying to seat the officials with the PM’s entourage in the front row he might have been thinking about the health of his annual confidential report, but by doing so he ended up creating a mess for the PM. We hope the government will draw the correct lesson from this episode. *
Source: Daily Times
Date:8/23/2005
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