The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has been informed that some 1,000 journalists of Islamabad had applied for plots after the government launched new sectors in Islamabad and invited applications from the general public, government servants and others as part of a uniform policy to give plots to those who were permanently living in Islamabad and did not have any property. A two per cent quota was also fixed for Islamabad-based journalists. A high-powered committee comprising government officials and senior journalists was formed which after careful scrutiny of the applicants, had recommended names of 172 journalists who were given plots against payments. The PAC is in possession of a list of 172 journalists who were given plots in the federal capital in line with their two per cent quota in G-13 and G-14 sectors (Express Tribune, November 2010). The names of journalists who were given plots against payments were:

Four journalists Rauf Klasra, Amir Mateen, Khaleeq Kiani and Javed Ch were given plots in light of the Lahore High Court decision of 2006 in their favour after their names were deleted from the final list on the orders of the then prime minister Shaukat Aziz.

The list also contains the names of PTV employees who were given plots. They include Nazir Tabsum, Qamar Mohiuddin, Nisar Baloch, Syed Javed Ali, Khalid Iqbal Warriach, Syed Zulfiqar Ali Shah, Ayub Minhas, Asmatullah Khan Niazi, Muzamil Ahmed Khan, Majeed Afzal Khan (Sajan Khan), Awaid Butt, Rashid Baig, Ramzan Khalid, Muhammad Arshad Saleem, Muhammad Zakariya, Musadiq Kaleem, Arif Mahmood.

David Barsamian talks about Journalism in Kashmir

http://www.thekashmirwalla.com/2012/01/exclusive-david-barsamian-on-journalism-in-kashmir/

Photo Credit: PAKISTAN TODAY

1. Basement extended under frontarcades
2. Basement extended into adjacentplazas without LDA approval 
3. Building projected onto road sidefrom first to top floor
4. Steel structure projection tocreate balcony, place electric sub-station in rear balcony
5. Arcades on front side raised 
6. Encroaching rear arcade byconstructing wall and placing generator.

These are all very clear reasons and genuinebuilding code violations. If it was any other building it would be an issue butjust because the owner has recently joined PTI this whole case has been given apolitical face. It is at this point I would like to explain how PTI and itssupporters are being duped by their own party and its new members.

Photo Credit: Insaf.pk

The purpose of the media is an easy one to understand. The dissemination of factual information on issue relevant to the citizenry. This entails (or should entail) a research and effort to uncover the truth, as well as a responsibility to uphold principles of free speech, adequate voice (as absolute voice and impartiality is impossible) and a separation to some extent from the control of politics. Thus the media has always been imagined as a ‘watchdog’ in its role in politics. This is what it was traditionally meant to be, thus its freedom was protected (like during the American Revolution when printing presses came in vogue) and thus its is critiqued today based on how free it is and how free it lets itself be (like Chomskys critique of the role of the media during the War on Terror). But who watches the watchdog?

Recently Deputy Chairman Planning Commission Nadeem Ul Haque was asked by a reporter on him speaking at the National Defence University (NDU) on December 26 against the nuclear program. In fact the reporter had his story wrong. It seems his “facts” were based on what he thought usually goes on at the NDU and he was oblivious to what the expertise of Nadeem Ul Haque was. Haque was actually scheduled to speak on the Planning Commission’s New Growth Framework, but the event had been cancelled due to lack of interest.

Thus Haque raised an important question in this article he wrote after the interaction with that reporter: “Why should such reform not get media space? Whose fault is this?”

He went on to say: “I know they want a headline against the current establishment. Consequently, all governments regardless of creed and origin have avoided serious governance/civil service reform. All have failed to change the paradigm on market competition. No government has attempted to use public service delivery to underpin our governance approach. No government has reviewed our current approach to urban development that produces a sprawl… Our intellectuals’ efforts, evident in the media, display little interest in these crucial issues. Countries seeking development spend a far larger proportion of their public debate on crucial development issues than we do.”

If the media does not pick up on issues that actually require policy reform, it will never signal the politicians and policy makers to reform nor will it create space for a debate on the issues that really matter.

As this Pak Media Watch article puts it: “If reporters are hunting for headlines against the government with utter disregard to whether their stories are factual or in any way useful to the country, they are failing in an important responsibility as journalists.”

This brings us to the second issue. Where have all the honest journalists gone? A narrow focus on specific types of stories is one thing but blatant lies and corruption is another. This story is just one example of the decay of the media profession itself. Najir Nazi in 2009 caught himself in a plot scandal (had it been today it would be sensationalized ridiculously as “plotgate”). A reporter called him and asked about illegal allotment of plots by the federal government and got a dose of expletives, and the established journalist unabashedly told the reporter to even record his words that would put PTA to shame.

Our watchdogs are certainly not above the dirty game the rest of the country is playing, heavily ties into local politics. Why would the media then talk about things like a New Growth Framework or public service delivery, when kicking the opposition in the shin and then using it as a headline is what can bring them closer to a G-8 plot allotment? (Read about it here)

Media to an extent is always funded and influenced by politics. However, in well function democracies, the media thought not unbiased, takes a position and provides information on policy, business, economy and development rather than only infotainment and vapid critiques of individual politicians that has no bearing on the conditions of the masses. A cursory look at Pakistani media takes us so far way from the ideals that this essay started off with that one feels dirty. If only the media felt it too.

Thank you Mark Dummett, for the report in BBC today paying tribute to Anthony Mascarenhas, the brilliant and courageous Pakistani journalist who had to flee abroad in order to be able to tell the truth – Bangladesh war: The article that changed history.

Mascarenhas

“Eight journalists, including Mascarenhas, were given a 10-day tour of the province (East Pakistan). When they returned home, seven of them duly wrote what they were told to,” writes Dummett.

“But one of them refused.”

That was Mascarenhas, who died in 1986 in London.

His wife Yvonne Mascarenhas told Dummett that she remembers him coming back distraught: “I’d never seen my husband looking in such a state. He was absolutely shocked, stressed, upset and terribly emotional. He told me that if he couldn’t write the story of what he’d seen he’d never be able to write another word again.”

“Clearly it would not be possible to do so in Pakistan. All newspaper articles were checked by the military censor, and Mascarenhas told his wife he was certain he would be shot if he tried,” writes Dummett.

Here is a case of a journalist who rose above what was no doubt being touted as the “national interest”. His subsequent reports in the Sunday Times made him a “traitor” to West Pakistan and a hero to the Bengalis. But I think he was a hero to the cause of journalism.

“There is little doubt that Mascarenhas’ reportage played its part in ending the war. It helped turn world opinion against Pakistan and encouraged India to play a decisive role,” writes Dummett… “Not that this was ever Mascarenhas’ intention”.

He was, simply, as editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans wrote in his memoirs, “just a very good reporter doing an honest job”.

It speaks volumes for the mainstream Pakistani narrative about the events of 1971, that I, as a journalist with a deep interest in human rights issues, never even heard of Anthony Mascarenhas until just a few years ago, and then too, quite by chance.

My uncle Zawwar Hasan, a retired journalist now over 80 years old, mentioned “Tony Mascarenhas” while reminiscing about how he ended up in this profession. Unsuccessful in getting a job in his own field, marketing, he had landed a job as a sports reporter with the government-controlled news agency Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) in Karachi in 1948. After his first assignment, a cricket match, he went to the India Coffee House with a new friend, another sports journalist, M. Akhtar.

“We wrote our reports there, and he gave me a lift to my office at APP.… Tony Mascarenhas was there – he later ended up with London Times,” said my uncle, remembering how Mascarenhas, who was editor of APP, had told him off for not coming straight back to the office after the match to file his report.

“Do you realise this is a news agency and every minute is precious. Anyway, show me what you have.”

Mascarenhas the editor then himself typed up the handwritten report (because the rookie reporter didn’t know how to type), telling him only to “come early tomorrow and learn to type.”

Being interested in the contributions of non-mainstream Muslims to Pakistan’s struggle for democracy, I was intrigued by the obviously Goan Christian name Mascarenhas. I started looking him up. I also learned how he “ended up with London Times”, initially as their correspondent in Pakistan.

According to the Times obituary of December 8, 1986, he was born Neville Anthony Mascarenhas in “Belgaum, near Goa, on July 10, 1928. A Roman Catholic, he was educated at St Patrick’s College, Karachi, before joining Reuters in Bombay in 1948.

“At the time of partition he was sent to Karachi to start their operation in the new state of Pakistan. He then helped to found Pakistan’s own news agency, APP.  In 1958 he joined the Times of Karachi as assistant editor…  From 1961 to 1971 he worked for the Morning News, mainly as assistant editor, though for two years (1963-5) he was its correspondent in India, and in 1965 was interned there with his family for three months while India and Pakistan were at war.

“In 1970 he was recruited by The Sunday Times, for which paper he wrote, the following year, the report from East Bengal which profoundly influenced opinion in the outside world, and which changed the course of his life.”

Read Dummett’s article for fascinating details about how Mascarenhas and his family escaped from Pakistan.

Later, in Cambridge MA, with access to the Harvard libraries, I found his books, The rape of Bangladesh (Delhi, Vikas Publications, 1971) and Bangladesh: a legacy of blood (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1986). As far as I know, neither is unavailable in Pakistan although I hear that there have been some translations.

Some years ago I asked a senior journalist who had been posted in Dhaka during 1971, why no one in West Pakistan wrote the truth about what was happening. “We were not allowed,” he said simply. “There was strict censorship.”

But Mascarenhas had the courage, and the opportunity, to follow his conscience.

As I wrote in an essay for the Economic and Political Weekly, the State controlled Pakistan Television, that started broadcasts in 1964, has remained very much ‘his master’s voice’.

Along with a few newspapers and the government controlled Radio Pakistan, PTV reported only what the government allowed. This censorship was particularly evident when it came to the growing unrest in what was then East Pakistan. The news censorship and slanting was so extreme that even on Dec 16, 1971, when the Pakistan army surrendered to the Indian, the West Pakistan media was still predicting victory. An exception was Anthony Mascarenhas, the Goa-born, Karachi-educated journalist…. In 1970, recruited by The Sunday Times, London, his reports on the happenings in East Bengal “profoundly influenced opinion in the outside world, and changed the course of his life”, as his obituary in The Times notes.

“He and his family had to leave their home and all their possessions in Karachi. He arrived in Britain on June 12, 1971, and the following day his three-page story appeared in The Sunday Times. It was quoted all over the world and won him awards from IPC and What the Papers Say. But it also earned him the bitter hatred of Pakistan’s military regime, and for time he had reason to fear for his life.”

Ironically, or perhaps tellingly, he had become an Indian citizen in 1976 –obviously Pakistan had disowned him — although at the time of his death he was intending to apply for British citizenship, according to the Times obituary.

As we stood at “Do Talwar” with our banners and placards raising our voices against irresponsible statements from politicians, insensitive and unethical reporting by media and increased unchecked incidents of violence against women in the city, it was strange to see people passing by in their cars or on foot, turning around to look at us as if we were the weird ones. There was a bevy of media people gathered around us, most of them trying to understand what the fuss was all about, many of them probably on the lookout for a politician or two. They spotted a couple of celebrities amongst the protesters and headed for them and when one of the policemen decided to make a statement, the focus of the media switched to him instead of to the protest itself.

One of the television guys actually tried to get all the women in one place so that he could film just us. I asked him why he wanted just the women. There were a lot of men there too. He said “because this is a woman’s issue.” How is violence a women’s issue? How is crime a women’s issue? How is a protest against irresponsible reporting a women’s issue? How is totally senseless statements that are aimed at the survivor as opposed to the perpetrator a women’s issue? How is revealing the name, car registration number and other details of the survivor a women’s issue?

When will people begin to understand that any issue that affects any citizen of this country, actually affects us all and all of us need to raise our voice against injustice, against violence, against corruption, against inadequate health and social services, against insufficient funds spent on education, against unethical and irresponsible behaviour. If we don’t, then we have only ourselves to blame.

With the increased number of media channels, magazines, newspapers, FM stations and social media networks out there, it is extremely important that we become more responsible in whatever we say and write. I am not suggesting unnecessary legislation or censorship. However, we need to understand that with Freedom of expression comes great responsibility. We must ensure that whatever we say is accurate, is corroborated, does not infringe on someone’s privacy and is not insensitive or unethical or likely to cause harm. We also need to do some research on the subject we decide to write or talk about.

Many of the tv channels had only sent cameramen to the protest and even those reporters who were there, were unaware of the issues so how could they possibly create a credible report. A few of the Print media had sent people who asked some sensible questions. However, I was very disappointed to see that when WAR’s (War Against Rape) Khadija started to talk about all the pending cases that needed attention, no-one from the press actually listened. It was very sad.

We look to the media to be watchdogs, to report the news responsibly, ethically and intelligently so that there is accountability. But with Breaking News being the order of the day, who checks facts, who bothers to be sensitive to the victims needs, who cares if the survivor’s privacy is protected. Sensationalism and sound bytes is what it’s all about.

This was the first time that the “Take Back the Tech” team participated in a street protest. We were proud to be there with our placards asking for an end to violence. Other protesters were curious but happy to see us there. They asked us what the Take Back the Tech campaign was all about and, once they knew, many of them held up the extra placards we had taken with us. If nothing else, we were able to create an awareness, speak up against injustice and show our support for the cause. I was also happy to see some colleagues from Microsoft at the protest. It was actually quite a diverse group. Amongst them were artists, writers, finance people, housewives, teachers, business executives, NGO representatives, students and activists.

Maybe people are finally realizing that it is time to wake up. We are citizens of this country and if we want things to change, we need to speak up for ourselves and for others. Let’s break the silence now. Let us hold people accountable. Let’s join hands and offer solutions, not just criticism.