Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) Spokesman Mashhood Tajwar said in a letter addressed to the editor of English language daily The Nation on Friday that the national flag-carrier “contradicts a news item appearing in The Nation titled ‘PIA losing. Officers boozing’, dated 13 May 2011”.
Tajwar said PIA was “indeed flying high and has in the year 2010 achieved a record revenue of Rs 107 billion with an operating profit of Rs 720 million”. He said that the news story was “not only baseless but also defames the national carrier and its senior officials”. Rebutting the newspaper’s claims, Tajwar said PIA’s marketing department, under the leadership of the current marketing director, had achieved “the highest revenue in the history of PIA” in 2010.
“PIA will never come under pressure of the people having vested interest. There is no truth in the concocted news story while the correspondent, Amraiz Khan, has used derogatory remarks just to malign” the marketing director of the PIA and other officials of the airline, said Tajwar. “Based on the news story, it seems as if the correspondent, Amraiz Khan, was personally present at the function, which is not the case and no one from The Nation even bothered to verify [the report] and it was published,” said Tajwar.
More recently, another story by The Nation titled “PIA allocates cargo space to blue-eyed agents”, dated May 8, 2011, also made erroneous claims, said Tajwar. “The correspondent, Mr Amraiz Khan, was informed of the factual position by the PIA spokesman but on the contrary, the one sided news story was published. The news story does not have any substance as the cargo rates and space allocation has not been finalized but yet the news story states that cargo space has been allocated,” he said.
The PIA spokesman said that The Nation had gone beyond the norms of ethical reporting and produced a distorted version in order to pressurise the airline to increase the circulation of the newspaper onboard PIA flights.
