=> KARACHI, PAKISTAN — It’s the height of election s
KARACHI, PAKISTAN — It’s the height of election season, and Pakistani television audiences might expect the airwaves to be crackling with live campaign coverage, argumentative talk shows and sharp-tongued political commentary.
Instead, two weeks before this country’s most hotly contested parliamentary vote in years, broadcast outlets operate under a stringent code of conduct imposed by President Pervez Musharraf during a six-week period of emergency rule that ended this month.
Political activists, human rights organizations and media groups believe the restrictions, to remain in place indefinitely, seriously diminish the prospects of a free and fair election.
“Being on the air is not the same as being free,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, a representative in Pakistan of New York-based Human Rights Watch. “The coverage is quite circumscribed, quite sanitized, and not at all conducive to helping people make informed decisions about their political future.”
Upon imposing de facto martial law, one of Musharraf’s first actions was to jam the signals of dozens of independent TV and radio channels. Most have since been allowed to resume broadcasting, but the most widely watched Urdu-language news channel, Geo, remains banned. In impoverished rural Pakistan in particular, Urdu news programs are a powerful force in shaping opinion.
To get back on the air, the broadcast outlets had to agree to refrain from live coverage, including that of candidates’ speeches at political rallies. Popular politics-themed talk shows were dropped from the programming lineup. Defaming Musharraf or the army is now punishable by fines or jail time.
Coming after a flowering of media freedoms in the last five years, the crackdown is difficult for many to swallow.
“Imagine an election without free media,” said Talat Hussain, a journalist whose daily current-affairs talk show on the Aaj television channel was canceled under government pressure. “For us, it’s not so much a professional setback as sheer embarrassment that such a thing is happening in our country.”
Guest commentators who appear regularly on talk shows say they are being explicitly warned that certain topics are off limits, including the state of emergency, during which Musharraf suspended the constitution, jailed thousands of opponents and fired dozens of senior judges.
“When I arrived for a taping, I was instructed not to mention or refer in any way to President Musharraf,” said Tauseef Ahmed Khan, an analyst and columnist who teaches mass communications at Urdu University in Karachi. “That makes it very hard to talk about what is happening.”
Inconsistent enforcement
Enforcement of the code of conduct is inconsistent, media observers say. The restrictions have fallen most heavily on Urdu-language stations, the main source of news and information in a country where nearly half the population is illiterate.
“On TV, you see coverage of candidates out campaigning, but it’s made to appear that the government-backed ones are equal in popularity to the opposition ones,” said Waris Raza of the Urdu-language channel ARY.
He said reporters and producers routinely receive threatening telephone calls from bureaucrats or army representatives when the news coverage is perceived to have crossed a line.
“And the call comes on a number whose display is blocked, so you don’t know for certain who you are talking to, or to whom you can appeal,” Raza said.
English-language outlets, seen by a much smaller audience composed mainly of the educated urban elite, appear less affected by the restrictions.
“I don’t think our editorial content is really noticeably different than before,” said Azhar Abbas, director of news and current affairs at Dawn News. But the days of unscripted live coverage of political rallies and street demonstrations are gone; such scenes now run on tape delays.
Last spring, when enormous crowds turned out in Pakistani cities to support independent-minded Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry after he was suspended by Musharraf, TV channels carried the rallies live, providing viewers in the countryside with their first inkling that Musharraf’s rule was being seriously challenged for the first time since he took power in a 1999 military coup.
Chaudhry was reinstated by the Supreme Court, but Musharraf fired him immediately upon declaring emergency rule Nov. 3 and insists that he will never be reinstated. The deposed chief justice, together with many other senior judges and barristers, remains under house arrest.
Rights activists and analysts point out that the Musharraf government is well aware that an English-language channel such as Dawn is seen by diplomats and foreign journalists, and allowing it relative freedom gives an impression of normalcy in campaign coverage.
‘Very restrictive’
“You have to see the channels watched by the masses to be aware of what is happening, to see how very restrictive it all is,” said Hasan, of Human Rights Watch.
Print journalism has been less affected as well, most likely for the same reason, said journalist and author Ahmed Rashid.
“The crackdown has not been so much against the newspapers,” he said. “Obviously there’s self-censorship, and a lot of telephone calls coming from the Ministry of Information. But in terms of the election and its outcome, what appears in print certainly does not have the impact of what’s seen on the Urdu channels.”
Television journalists freely acknowledge that the rapid expansion of private channels over the last several years initially resulted in an on-air free-for-all, with little in the way of professional standards of conduct. For example, stations would routinely rush out raw footage from the scene of suicide bombings, with grisly images of mangled bodies and severed limbs.
“We have spent a huge amount of money in the past year or more on training our staff, working on bringing them up to a more international standard,” said Owais Tohid, the news director of a new English-language channel that Geo had planned to launch this month. “We teach them that you can tell a story, that you can show how destructive a bombing is, without resorting to tactics like that.”
When Musharraf took the private channels off the air, he accused news outlets of “glorifying” suicide bombers with sensational coverage. Some analysts, though, say that in the run-up to the vote, it suits the government to limit coverage of its ongoing confrontation with Islamic militants, an unpopular cause among many Pakistani voters.
Rashid, who has written extensively about militant groups, including the Taliban, said television coverage of a suicide attack Friday at a mosque in restive North-West Frontier Province was “very subdued” though more than 50 people were killed.
“Especially at this time, it’s important that we Pakistanis know what is going on,” said shopkeeper Mushtaq Ali in Islamabad, the capital. “Instead, we are guessing and gossiping, as if we all still lived the life of villagers. We want to be a modern country, and for that we need information.”
Source: Los Angeles Times
Date:12/25/2007
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