The media really does have the run of the place in Pakistan. As long as they avoid the military, the fundamentalist militant organisations, till recently, the MQM, and the judiciary, they can pretty much say whatever they want.
Only recently has Pemra started tightening the screws, though even that is viewed more as the fruit of political patronage for the government in the appointment of former journalist Absar Alam as chairperson. Even seemingly incontestable decisions of his, like banning Dr Shahid Masood for a month for his baseless allegations against the Sindh High Court Chief Justice were being painted by not just Dr Masood but also PTI chairman Imran Khan as politically motivated.
There do exist libel and print laws in the country but, as most other laws, the problem is the execution. Our Dickensian courts are clogged with enormous backlog with cases taking 20 years or so if one wants to approach appellate benches all the way to the top.
Only recently, however, an Achilles’ of sorts has emerged. Simply sue the news outfit in the UK, if it exists there.
The Urdu news media market in the UK is lucrative. Around 1.7 million Pakistanis live in the country, after all. All local outfits want a cut of that pie and Geo and ARY do quite well there. It is there that the former went against the latter in Ofcom, the UK’s media regulatory watchdog.
Ofcom found ARY guilty of making 24 (count them, 24) defamatory charges against Geo owner Mir Shakeel-ur-Rehman and ordered them to cough up 185,000 pounds. When accounting for other costs, British media reports suggest a total setback to the tune of three million pounds.
ARY is also being sued in the UK by finance and textile magnate Mian Muhammad Mansha. Ofcom has already ruled in favour of Ziauddin Yousufzai, who was the subject of slander by ARY.
On an even more serious note: a nation able to govern themselves was the answer Jawaharlal Nehru gave when asked about what he expected of his country in the future. The context, of course, was the naysaying British imperialists who said we couldn’t do it on our on.
It is sad that, some 70-odd years after partition, we still need to go back to the UK to settle our squabbles.