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With news banned from TV, Pakistanis find it on the Web
Musharraf's crackdown on news and dissent has managed to miss a vibrant Internet community.
By Shahan Mufti | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the November 7, 2007 edition
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Islamabad, Pakistan - When Hamzah Tariq, the owner of a small software-development firm, returned home on Saturday night after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had declared a "state of emergency," he discovered that all of the news channels were missing from his cable signal. The only option: PTV, Pakistan's state-run news channel.
"There was a ridiculous show about bridal makeup and then I read the ticker at the bottom: 'Chief of the Army Staff declares emergency. Suspends 1973 constitution,' " says Mr. Tariq. After half an hour of meticulously applied mascara, there was a news bulletin. "The newscaster came on and read out those same lines, nothing more, and said "and now, some sports."
So Tariq and millions of other Pakistanis, faced with a ban on about a dozen domestic and international TV news stations and curbs on newspapers, are finding breaking news in live video feeds and special blogs set up online – the only forum of public discourse that the media ban has missed.
Indeed, Pakistan today is a very different country from the one Musharraf took over eight years ago. In his 1999 coup, the military had only to target the offices of PTV, the only TV news source in the country at the time, and cut off all phone lines provided by the state-owned company to complete an information blackout.
Since then, Musharraf has allowed for a blossoming of free and independent media – a force with which, ironically, he now finds himself in contention.
As if to thumb his nose at the media ban, deposed Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, the unlikely hero of the movement against Musharraf's military rule, managed to call a group of lawyers from a concealed cellphone on Tuesday while under house arrest. A digital recording of his speech has since been leaked to the Web, where Pakistanis can download it from the BBC's Urdu service.
"By shutting private media down, they thought they could control the political message," says Adnan Rehmat, who heads Internews Pakistan, a Washington-based media watchdog group. "But it's only encouraged people to come up with new and creative ways of constructing a message and passing it around."
Before this weekend, PTV faced stiff competition from a panoply of informative news stations. GEO-TV was the first private news channel to go on air in 2002 and ever since, whether originating in Pakistan or beaming in from nearby Dubai, Pakistanis have had a buffet of TV viewing options. Today, there are over 60 independent TV channels, and that number was expanding rapidly. Many of them broadcast news exclusively.
An accompanying boom in Internet access and mobile phone ownership has fundamentally transformed the information environment in the country.
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