Moborate

I was going to post my outrage over the depths of tabloid-y sleazebaggery that The News sunk to today but blogger Tazeen has already said all that needed to be said, so you should go over and read her post . I concur completely. Not only did the reporter, editors and owners of The News break all norms of professional journalistic ethics and the right to privacy, they have also abetted a truly despicable hospital administrator in flouting a sacred oath of patient confidentiality and exposed a woman to prosecution from odious Zia-era Hudood laws that they claim to have been in the vanguard of the fight against . They should be ashamed of themselves. We have in the past protested strongly when sleazy personal and defamatory stories against the Jang Group CEO Mir Shakilur Rahman were publicised on the floor of the Sindh Assembly  and in the media. For someone who has borne the brunt of such unethical invasion of personal privacy, it boggles the mind that he would allow his newspap...

More than one commentator has ascribed the relative dearth of recent posts on this blog to our having taken the easy way out (as others before us) and our expending too much energy on Twitter . And you know what, they may not be completely incorrect. It is, of course, far easier to write pithy sentences of 140 characters rather than thought out essays - even rants - and there is more immediate feedback. Sometimes even a conversation. (And yes, I do remember our initial expression of disdain for it.) It isn't the only reason (as I've tried to explain before ) but it could be one reason. So I thought what better way to ease back into blogging after a longish hiatus by having a post about that infernal sinkhole of time and energy, Twitter, which as we all know now even has the Chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party,  Bilawal Bhutto Zardari,   in its clutches . And what better way to really make it easy by having someone else do all the writing and my being simply the medium po...

First things first: apologies to all for the disappearing act. (For those who actually noticed, a silent note of appreciation.) Had been away for a rather long stretch of time and while I was able to follow developments back home in an irregular fashion, simply did not have the time or access to all the information to put a post up (the perils of work work). And much has happened in the media while I have been away, which I hope to get round to in a one-by-one fashion. In particular, there are some interesting developments brewing on the electronic media front. However, I first want to take up the issue which apparently threatens the very survival of humanity itself. Yes, I am referring to the shut down of Geo 's sports channel Geo Super and it's music and entertainment channel Aag . To hear Geo talk about it, it is nothing less than the rule of tyranny, the deprivation of Pakistanis of all that is good and worth living for, and the wiping out from people's lives of all i...

Just when you think Pakistani political discourse cannot sink any lower, your delusions are undermined with even more sleaze. Our SleazeMaster of the Day is none other than Sindh Home Minister, Dr. Zulfiqar Mirza , who has never been a stranger to spouting crude diatribes in an 'I'll say what I want and I don't care what you think!' fashion. He has understandably been under some pressure recently since his party, the Pakistan People's Party 's (PPP's) main parliamentary ally, the Muttaheda Qaumi Movement (MQM), had sort of made his removal from his current post or a restraining order on his mouth a precondition for continuing support to the government. He seems to have been particularly irked by a story in The News and Jang  on March 14 that he was about to be shown the door as Home Minister within 10-12 days and it was partly the intervention of his wife, Fehmida Mirza , the current Speaker of the National Assembly, that prevented an immediate boot. Nothi...

We had internally decided to steer clear of commenting on the rumours circulating on the internet - apparently for a few months now though they seem to have got more notice in the last few days - about President Asif Zardari 's alleged secret marriage to a Pakistani-American physician Dr. Tanveer Zamani . The reasons for this were rather simple: in the absence of any credible evidence (even the blogs asserting this information admitted that they had no real evidence and were basing their claims on hearsay), any comment would be mere speculation and not a lot different from tabloid sleaze. Secondly, there's a tricky line here between 'public interest' and using someone's entirely private life to somehow discredit them in the eyes of some. Although it can be argued that Zardari re-marrying could impact national politics and thus be of 'public interest', until that information is confirmed, it remains within the realm of the millions of unverified rumours circu...

I had been contemplating writing an update on Geo for over a week but the latest news has forced my hand. According to our very credible informer @Mehmal, former Daily Times editor Najam Sethi has resigned from Dunya TV and signed up with Geo , though the official announcement has yet to be made. According to our various sources, his last show with Dunya will be on January 6 and he will be hosting a show three times a week on Geo thereafter. Najam Sethi: moving from Dunya to Geo Now this news is rather big news, not only in and of itself - after all, Sethi is a big hitter for Dunya to lose and Geo to nab - but also because of what it indicates about the direction of Geo. You may recall our post in November about Geo CEO Mir Ibrahim Rahman 's (MIR's) mysterious trip to the US, wherein we had expressed our assessment that you may soon see a decidedly less antagonistic-to-the-Americans line from the Jang Group (read the earlier post to understand why). In that post we had al...

Reading through the top story in today's The News and Jang , my eyes grew progressively wider and wider. Not so much from the latest Wikileaks revelations about India as from sheer incredulity.   The News Karachi's front page today Titled " Enough evidence of Indian involvement in Waziristan, Balochistan " (aside: how much is 'enough'?) in The News , the main story deals with a slew of information allegedly from US diplomatic cables sent from Delhi as well as other missions around the world about India. They confirm everything Pakistanis (or at least certain types of Pakistanis) always said about India: it's direct involvement of India in the anti-state activities in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan, the weakness of the Indian dossier on Ajmal Kassab, the manipulated nature of Indian evidence about the ISI's involvement in the Mumbai attacks, the sissyness of India's generals who do things out of personal ego an...

Oh wow. We've all become so used to the hyperbole of the Western and local language English press around Pakistan Fashion Weeks , that it is sometimes easy to forget how a significant section of society in Pakistan views them. And who better to represent that view than our intrepid Khalifa-ul-Waqt , Ansar Abbasi, who can and will hold forth on anything. The guardian of Pakistan's values: Ansar Abbasi Below is a translation of his Urdu op-ed piece published in today's Jang (thanks to @tazeen for drawing my attention to it). It is worth a read, not only because it provides a window to the mindset of Abbasi and possibly many, many others. But also because it draws attention, once again, to the linguistic divide that separates the English reading public and non-English reading public, a divide that is not only tolerated but pandered to. (It is extremely unlikely you would ever read anything like this article in the Jang group's English paper The News or any other Englis...

Guess who was spotted on November 9 in Washington D.C. at a reception for American and Pakistani media personnel thrown by US AfPak ambassador Richard Holbrooke 's media assistant Ashley Bommer ? Mir Ibrahim Rehman , scion of the house of Jang and CEO of the Geo TV Network. He walked in with The Friday Times editor and Dunya TV's Najam Sethi but stayed long after Sethi left the party. Mir Ibrahim Rehman (c) at his master's convocation earlier this year Mir Ibrahim (MIR) apparently jetted in for a mysterious three-day visit to the US, during which, our sources say, the main objective was to convince the US administration that Geo was neither anti-US nor anti-democracy, the line being peddled by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government. MIR also wished to gather official American support for the Jang Group against the PPP boycott of the group as an instance of an assault on freedom of the media. Our sources claim that MIR did not find too much traction among US offic...

It's getting so that even reporting on people changing jobs in the media has become risky business. As in, risky for one's credibility. Even though we do rely on very good sources before putting the information out here. The latest U-turn (and believe us, it is a U-turn) is morning show star Dr Shahista Wahidi 's announcement today on ARY that the news of her departure from the channel is simply rumour and not based on fact. Yes, Dr Wahidi, tell that to Geo which had bade Nadia Khan farewell and was having your new show's set designed. Obviously, this can only mean that ARY has upped the ante even further than the 22 lakhs a month Geo had offered Wahidi to lure her. Some people have all the luck, particularly at channels where many complain of not being paid their far more meagre salaries on time. It was precisely because of this pendulum style of job negotiations that we had held off on reporting about The News senior investigative journalist Rauf Klasra 's pot...