On Plea of Dawn's CEO for Press Freedom: Comments

I was very disturbed by seeing the plea made by Dawn's CEO to make people aware of the dire situation the journalists face in Pakistan today.

Here is a plea for help from the CEO of Dawn Newsgroup. It gives some insight into the kind of tactics employed by the present government to discourage and restrain the newspapers and journalists to scrutinize and criticize government actions. Even though, I think that the Pakistani press has relatively more freedom right now compared to the more repressive military and democratic regimes of the past, and even though their tactics to coerce a newspaper to filter out anti-government news have been generally less brutal, their claim to actual press freedom is merely a farce to dupe the western media and other international organizations.

They tacitly put 'sanctions' on any newspaper, or threaten it with consequences that dares to explore any news worthy item, which may go against the government. The top administration continually monitors and at various times dictates the interests of the government to the private media. It is unfortunate that the circulation of various newspapers, specially the english ones is not sufficient in itself to make them profitable, so they rely heavily on the government related advertisements.

One of the probable causes in my opinion is the lack of any real legal protection from such threats. The idea of the freedom of press is considered as a privilege given by the government to the press, not as their right (Borrowed this term from Aniket's article on feminism). Hence, whenever it does not suit the government, it is swift to take this privilege back and until recently not many newspapers had the courage to report actions against them. Until, such whimsy privileges translate into legal rights and protected by Courts of law, which apparently are trying to exhibit some independence, giving me some reason for optimism, we may continue to see the mauling of press freedom by overt or covert government policies.