Umar Cheema experienced the latest brand of Pakistani media suppression firsthand.
Cheema, a prominent investigative reporter, works for national newspaper The News and has 1.1 million Twitter followers.
This year in July, after he posted some tweets critical of the Pakistan government and military, his managers received calls pressuring them to respond. In Pakistan, such calls typically originate with the military. Cheema was forced to take down his Twitter account for a week.
Journalists in Pakistan have long been at the mercy of the country’s powerful military and rulers. But Cheema and others say what’s happening under Prime Minister Imran Khan might not be as brutal as the suppression of previous governments, but it’s far more insidious and pervasive.
“In the past, the military had picked up journalists, beaten them up or would make threatening calls,” Cheema told VOA. “They have become more sophisticated.”
The censors are wielding a broad arsenal of punishing tools – from shutting down cable channels, cutting off government advertising, intimidating media owners and unleashing an army of social media attack trolls.
Moreover, critics say Khan’s government and the military are in lockstep, making matters worse than past periods of military martial law.
“At least then we were in a position to publicly say we are not allowed to publish the whole truth,” said Zaffar Abbas, editor of Dawn, a paper that has won acclaim for standing up to censors.
“Now, the bulk of the media is churning out lies and half-truths, and we can’t even complain as most of the owners have surrendered to these demands,” Abbas said.
What Cheema experienced reflects the
Cheema received an International Press Freedom Award in 2011 from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the U.S. advocacy group. He had been abducted, tortured, stripped naked and his head and eyebrows shaved after stories reporting that the Pakistani military and the
Also in July, three Pakistani news channels were taken off-air after they broadcast a news conference by Maryam Nawaz Sharif. Although authorities claimed the channels were down due to “technical reasons,” the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said they had been blocked by PEMRA without any notification.
Sharif was taken into custody in August after she held several large political rallies criticizing the government and military. She remains in jail.
In July 2018, Sharif had been fined and sentenced to seven years in prison on corruption charges, but in September of that year the Islamabad High Court suspended her sentence.
“Maryam Nawaz was freed on order of the court, and the former president is an accused, not a convict,” Mir said. “There’s no law in Pakistan which deprives either of them the right to voice their views on TV. No government body wrote to us informing what laws the interview was skirting. We received nothing in writing.”
Mir knows something about government pressure.
In 2014, he barely escaped an assassination attempt following a series of programs in which he criticized the military for meddling in foreign policy and for their operations in Balochistan province – where dissenters have gone missing without a trace.
“When the former president’s interview was cut short, I did reach out to the owners of my TV channel,” Mir said. “They were succinct in their rejection, saying there was too much pressure and they had to yield, after which they hung up.”
Deep-state spin
The censorship has a cost.
“Things from the margins are not reported. Former tribal areas, political crises in Kyber Pakhtoonkhwa, unrest in Balochistan, Gilgit-Baltistan, and even Pakistani-administered Kashmir are lost in some information black hole,” said Mohammad Hanif, a British-Pakistani journalist who writes for The New York Times.
“Voices from these areas are not allowed to go on-air as even the mainstream opposition politicians are not allowed to have their say on media,” he said. “So increasingly, we are getting information that is being sanctioned by the deep state, or comes with a heavy-handed spin.”
Media officials told VOA that the military recently has moved to quash news about the Pashtun rights movement known as PTM. The movement sprung up in in the war-torn tribal areas along the Afghan border. Its leaders have criticized the military for allegedly harboring the Pakistani Taliban and mistreating locals.
Last December, VOA Urdu’s website was blocked in Pakistan after covering a news conference by PTM’s leader Mohsin Dawar.
In an interview with VOA, Pakistan military spokesperson Major Gen. Asif Ghafoor denied any military involvement in curbing press freedom in Pakistan.
“How can army control a media which is so powerful?” he asked. “There is so much happening in the country. We have been in a war-like situation, as the prime minister of Pakistan has said during his U.S. visit.”
Ghafoor also disputed allegations that the military uses social media trolls to go after journalists. “How can I have such a big team of people for social media use? These are Pakistanis who are in favor of Pakistan military, and it’s their right of speech,” he said.
Furor over an exposé
If the increasing pressure on news media can be traced to one story, it would have to be the one known as “Dawn Leaks,”
published before Khan became prime minister.
On October 6, 2016, Cyril Almeida, an editor and columnist at the newspaper Dawn, exposed confidential minutes of a meeting between the government and military officials about Pakistan’s failure to aggressively move against terrorists.
In one exchange, the leader of Pakistan’s largest province accused the military and intelligence service of freeing internationally designated terrorists after they’d been arrested by civilian security forces.
Almeida’s report sparked a firestorm. While denouncing the story as inaccurate, the government fired its information minister. The military demanded a leak investigation.
Dawn came under brutal attack.
“A vicious media campaign, even calls for prosecuting the reporter and editor for treason, with one news anchor constantly reminding that its punishment is death,” Dawn Editor Abbas said. “Social media was used in a big way in an attempt to brand us as anti-state.”
In another May 2018 report, Dawn published an interview with former Prime Minister Sharif in which he complained about the slow pace of trials for Pakistanis behind the terror attacks that killed some 160 people in Mumbai over four days in 2008. In comments seen as controversial, Sharif wondered why Pakistan could have allowed the militants to cross its border.
Authorities blocked Dawn from distributing the paper at military institutions and many towns and cities.
Dawn’s editor, Abbas, said some parts of the country are still out of bounds. It’s another way censorship is exerted, he said.
”Officially, there’s no censorship, but large section of the media, if not being totally controlled, is being greatly influenced to churn out just one narrative, i.e., a pro-Pakistan narrative — nothing else is kosher or acceptable,” he said.
Dawn’s situation hasn’t gone unnoticed outside Pakistan. Almeida was named 2019 World Press Hero by the International Press Institute. Abbas earned the 2019 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The advocacy group Reporters Without Borders also nominated Dawn for its 2019 Independence award. “The country’s oldest daily newspaper is the only one that continues to resist military rule,” RSF said.
But inside Pakistan, the atmosphere is stifling.
“As a journalist, if you do not toe the line you are out of job,” Mohammad Hanif said. “As a media owner if you defy the powers-that-be, then your channel is off-air, advertisers are pressured, your rivals are being used to portray you as anti-state.”