Press freedom in Pakistan impresses Australian media team
Anil Datta
An Australian newspaper’s delegation said on Monday it was really impressed by the degree of press freedom and the bold and neutral reportage in Pakistan.The two-member delegation comprised Oliver Perret, project manager at The Epoch Times, Sydney, Australia, and Jenny Zang.
“Back home, we had been given rather a different account of the press in Pakistan and were under the impression that the government of Pakistan had very draconian laws pertaining to the press, but on having stayed in the country for a couple of days, we have found out to our pleasant surprise that what we have been given to understand at home is an absolutely erroneous impression,” said Perret while speaking to The News.
Perret and Zang were attending a dual function at the Arts Council, firstly to launch the book “Why we should not take bribe?” by Muhammad Saleem Butt, Commissioner, Inland Revenue (formerly income tax department), and a demonstration by the two of the art of Falundafa, a meditative technique to sustain health and maintain a healthy body and a sound mind. Falundafa could be considered the Chinese version of yoga.
Both Perret and Zang are members of the Universal Peace Foundation, an international NGO, which, among other things, has the objective of promoting interfaith harmony. They said that while in Multan recently they had been to churches and mosques and other projects working for interfaith dialogue.
Perret said Australia did not have half the papers Pakistan had. Most papers in Australia were owned by Rupert Murdoch and hence they had a very pro-US editorial content, he said. In this regard, he named The Daily Telegraph, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Australian.
Talking about the print media in Australia, he said there was no government restriction and reportage was unfettered but different media had different relations. “Some Chinese colony papers have affiliations with the Communist Party of China from where they also receive their funding. Hence their editorial content is very pro-China.”
Some papers, Perret said, were owned by large corporations; hence their coverage was driven by economic expediency and capitalism. The same were the views of Perret’s colleague, Jenny Zang, who said she never thought that the press in Pakistan would be so free. She said she was so happy to find the totally free and unfettered reportage in Pakistani papers.
As for the electronic media, she approved of them in principle but said that sometimes TV channels tended to overplay and overemphasise negative happenings, which should not be done.
She said she had found the Pakistani people really hospitable and caring. “While back home, we had been associating Pakistan with bomb blasts and suicide attacks, things really turned out to be so different when they got here and we found that Pakistan was such a vibrant country. Pakistan is a beautiful country.”
Along the sidelines of the function, the book, “Why we should not take bribe”, was launched.Speaking at the launch, Tahir Muhammad Bhatti said that bribery was a very common evil today.
“We have lost track of divine laws. Bribery is a sin through which we negate our internal capabilities. It erodes justice and merit, things which are imperative to the functioning of a healthy society.” Butt thanked the Almighty Allah for having given him the strength and determination to write the book, which, he said, was a reflection of divine teachings.
The Epoch Times, he said, had also invited him to speak on the evil of bribery towards the latter half of the year.Interestingly enough, the person who edited the book has made a real gaffe. On the cover, the title “Why we should not take bribe” is written in the interrogative form, ending with a question mark, thus not only changing but totally reversing the meaning of the theme. The function began exactly an hour and twenty-five minutes late. Scheduled for 5pm, it took off at 6:25pm.
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