Imran sees anti-PTI bias in Dawn

• Hameed Haroon says media group publishes duly verified reports, has independent editorial policy

After Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khan and PTI’s infamous spat with Geo TV, the PTI chairman on Tuesday took to Twitter to criticise another media group for having “anti-PTI bias”.

“The blatant bias of Dawn against PTI has now come out in the open. So much for Dawn’s neutral and liberal credentials! Complete farce! Full marks to Stevan Sackur for exposing Dawn in his BBC HARDtalk interview,” Imran said in a tweet.

The PTI chief was referring to a question in the interview wherein Sackur had asked Hameed if Dawn was sympathetic to the erstwhile ruling party as he referred to the Dawn Leaks, which many see as Dawn’s pro-Sharifs stance.  Playing down the question, Hameed said the PML-N was not responsible for the Dawn Leaks and the newspaper only reported what was already available on the international media.

“Dawn published reports that are duly verified,” he asserted as he defended his paper’s unbiased editorial policy.

Commenting on the PTI chief’s proximity to the “deep state”, the Dawn CEO said that selective accountability did raise many an eyebrow. He was referring to the accountability process which has had only targeted PML-N and PPP to some extent till now.

Attempts are being made to bring up “second level string leaders and to patch-up a coalition that would rule with the directions given by the deep state”, Hameed said in an allusion to the so-called electoral engineering.

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“Dawn has been banned in various parts of the country and to substantiate my claims I can produce at least twenty hawkers who were stopped from distribution of the paper on different levels,” he said while commenting on the blackout faced by media, especially Dawn, in the run-up to the polls.

“Threats and intimidation against media groups, including The Nation, The News and Dawn, have intensified in the last few months, especially after Nawaz’s ouster,” he said, adding that these concerns had been repeatedly raised by the international and national human rights organisations.

“Have the employees of your media group in particular been intimidated?” questioned the interviewer. “Yes,” Hameed answered, adding that many working in other media groups had also reported instances where they were forced to indulge in “self-censorship”.

He also claimed that the military was behind the media blackout of Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM).

When the interviewer referred to a presser of the army spokesperson, Major General Asif Ghafoor, wherein he had denied curbs on media by the military, Hameed said Gen Ghafoor had shown a presentation brandishing pictures of at least 8 journalists and bloggers, terming them “anti-state” for their criticism of the army.