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Posted 04.25.08
Musharraf Creates a Media Monster (Dateline - Overseas Press Club) - April, 2008
In the nine years since he seized power, the general has fostered the growth of a vigorously independent group of private TV stations that have done their best to undermine his rule and restore democracy.

By Shahan Mufti

One evening in June 2007, during an oppressively hot summer in Islamabad, I attended a protest organized by Pakistani television journalists. A fiery stream lit Constitution Avenue -- the broad thorough- fare is lined with the state's most powerful political institutions -- as a torch-carrying procession marched past the Supreme Court building. The marchers chanted slogans against the military regime of Pervez Musharraf, vowing "endless war, till the media are freed."

Some of the biggest names in Pakistani television were among the protestors, names known to nearly a third of the urban population in this country of 150 million. "Imagine if one of us showed up on air with a bruise tomorrow," an anchor I recognized from a popular political talk show said, stopping next to me. He smiled smugly, and stepped over a listless tangle of barbed wire that had been flattened by the crowd. Islamabad police in full riot gear lined both sides of the road, watching silently.

The protest that evening -- there were several by journalists last year -- began with rousing speeches outside the offices of Pakistan's most popular private television network, GEO-TV. (The name is a double entendre; the word jeeo also means "thrive" or "live long" in Urdu.) Journalists, mainly from broadcast media, and hundreds of their supporters were demonstrating against the sweeping restrictions introduced by Musharraf's government a few days earlier on all electronic media -- basically FM radio and, particularly, the more than 60 private satellite television operations that have emerged in the last seven years as a popular but controversial alternative to state-run TV. The new laws restricted live coverage and gave unprecedented power to government regulators to seize private property and interrupt broadcasts deemed unacceptable.

The crackdown had been long coming. Three months earlier, in March, GEO-TV's offices were the scene of a defining moment for the journalists in Pakistan's independent television news business -- when they got tangled with the story of political upheaval they were covering, and glimpsed their untapped potential as a force for political change.

On March 16, government security forces raided GEO's offices after the network crossed an unspecified "red line" by broadcasting live coverage of a rally for the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who had been dismissed by Musharraf the previous week. In recent years, Chaudhry had repeatedly embarrassed Musharraf by aggressively prosecuting government corruption, and the president wanted him out of the way. Chaudhry emerged as a hero for those seeking an end to military rule. The security forces broke into the GEO building, shattered windows with batons, fired tear gas, and roughed up the men and women inside, demanding that the coverage stop.

That day, Pakistanis were riveted to their television sets as Hamid Mir, GEO's Islamabad bureau chief and the best-known journalist on Pakistani television, waged his own live, on-air struggle against the police. Defying orders to stop transmission, Mir locked himself in the basement of the newsroom. From there he broadcast a minute-by-minute narration of what was happening. "They're attacking us with tear gas now," he yelled at one point, as the network beamed shaky, raw footage of the clash over its satellite feed.

Hours later, the raid now over and the security troops gone (GEO never stopped its coverage), Mir, wearing a sober blue suit, was leaning into the camera for his live prime-time show. Pakistan's parliament, a creamy white colossus with the first article of Islam inscribed across the front, provided the backdrop. Mir announced a special guest for that evening's show, and a phone line crackled through to President Musharraf. "I would like to apologize," the pugnacious general said a few minutes into the interview, referring to the raid. "Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the freedom of media, this is my mandate. I strongly condemn any violation of this."

It wasn't typical Musharraf, to say the least. The general has earned a reputation for never apologizing. But then, it is said that television is making the impossible happen in Pakistan every day. Going head to head with the supreme leader of the country was just the beginning though. The subsequent year has seen the remaking of political power in Pakistan: a controversial reelection of Musharraf as President; his resignation as army chief; the rise and fall (and rise and fall again) of an independent judiciary; a military coup; the assassination of Pakistan's most prominent politician, Benazir Bhutto; and, to top it all off, a general election that wiped out Musharraf's loyalists earlier this year. The year would also be one of the most violent periods in the country's recent history.

The nascent independent television press found itself at the epicenter of all this. While it fought to win and retain its own freedoms, the scale of the events that it grappled with in its coverage challenged the very nature of its journalistic mission, raising questions about what role this powerful new medium can and should play in Pakistan.

In the summer of 2007, as Pakistan turned 60, the country appeared to be fracturing along multiple fault lines, even as the promise of democracy hovered in the near distance. After eight years of cagey military rule, Musharraf found himself on unstable ground. The judiciary was in revolt; the various opposition movements had united against him; an armed rebellion against the state was festering in the capital at the Red Mosque; floods along the southern coast had displaced over 200,000 people; and the U.S.-led "war on terror" was knocking loudly along Pakistan's porous 1,600-mile border with Afghanistan. Sensing change in the harsh summer winds, or loo, everyone, it seemed, spilled onto the streets to stake their claim.

A few months after the raid on GEO last year, I met Hamid Mir at his top-floor office in the network's Islamabad offices. The political storm that had blown with the dismissal of the chief justice was still buffeting the country. Chaudhry had been reinstated only days before to a shower of rose petals and street celebrations across the country, and he had specifically and publicly thanked the "media fraternity," without whom, he said, the rebirth of the judiciary would have been impossible. But Mir was in no mood to celebrate. He had been kicked upstairs to a management job by the channel's bosses days after the ransacking of GEO, and found himself effectively removed from daily editorial decisions. He was frustrated. "What did we gain that day? What did I gain?" he said. "I've only lost more freedoms every day since. I can't even go live on air anymore!" The television media's struggle, Mir said, was just beginning.

Mir's understanding of journalism's role in society comes from Pakistan's rich tradition of an independent print press, which has jousted with four different military regimes since the country's birth in 1947. Old print hands, like Mir, recall with pride when papers like Jang would publish blank columns to expose and protest government censorship.

But in a largely rural country with one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, print media has never been mass media. Newspapers sell mostly in urban centers, while in rural areas radio, and to a lesser extent state-run television (broadcast over a terrestrial network), are the main sources of news and information. With the Internet still available only to about 3 percent of Pakistanis, the influence of online journalism is negligible.

Until Musharraf came to power, there was no private satellite television in Pakistan. But now cable lines, carrying satellite television signals, are slowly creeping into even the most remote villages. A young documentary producer at Dawn News, the country's first 24-hour, English-language news channel, explained the significance of this: "They don't really have schools in interior Sindh," he said, referring to the most impoverished state in the country. "But now they have cable lines. So guess what? Now we're the ones educating all of them."

Pakistan remains one of the most dangerous places in the world for a journalist to work, yet in the nine years since Musharraf overthrew the democratically elected government of Nawaz Sharif in 1999, not only have newspapers maintained their independence, but Musharraf is credited, by critics and supporters alike, with fostering the growth of private broadcast media in the country.

Now, almost six years after the first private news channel went on air, the broadcast media are nipping at the regime that nurtured them, threatening to tear it down. Their coverage of the Chaudhry affair, as well as of Musharraf's increasingly vocal political opponents, set the broadcasters on a collision course with the president. Anti-Musharraf sentiment is boiling over in newsrooms at a time when his rule has never seemed shakier. "A few years ago you could have said if it wasn't for Musharraf, private television wouldn't be where it is," Mir said. "Today there is no doubt, if it wasn't for private television, General Musharraf wouldn't be in the mess that he is in."

From the start, Musharraf promised a technologically advanced society with an open economy and media sector, including a free press. But this also meant that didactic, state-censored news would lose viewers to, among other things, a primetime interview show hosted by a charming and funny transvestite or a satire depicting a schizophrenic, slightly delusional leader who was a dead ringer for the real President. "Infotainment" became a winning formula, and GEO and a few other news outlets, like ARY-TV, AAJ-TV and Dawn News emerged as serious competitors for state-run Pakistan Television, particularly in urban centers. Today GEO has four 24-hour channels for entertainment, sports, news, and youth, and plans to launch an English-language news channel soon.

But institutions at the center of such profound social change are bound to get scuffed up. Long before the state sought to tone down the broadcasters, satellite TV operations were being ransacked by sectarian mobs for attempting to cover religious conflict, by criminal networks for exposing them, by the powerful intelligence agencies for overstepping "national security" boundaries, and by religious militants for purveying vice. When Musharraf felt his pedestal wobble, the state became only the latest -- albeit the most powerful -- institution to lock horns with the broadcasters. Now, the boundaries within which this hungry new medium must operate are being negotiated in the streets, the newsrooms, the courtrooms, and the corridors of power.

The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority, or Pemra, based in Islamabad, is the government's central command in the battle with the broadcast media. It was established in 2002 before the first satellite channel took to the airwaves and is responsible for issuing licenses to all private radio and television channels, and to regulate them by setting the norms for content. "The emphasis," a journalist in Islamabad warned, "is on 'authority,' not as much on 'regulation.'" In 2005 President Musharraf handpicked the country's top-cop, Iftikhar Rashid, to head Pemra. Rashid, an accomplished and decorated police official, had a reputation for establishing strict order wherever he went.

"The President realized there was a massive problem with enforcement," Rashid tells me from behind a gleaming wooden desk in Pemra's head office, blocks from GEO's studios. When he took over, Rashid explains, 80% of all channels showing on cable were illegal or unlicensed, and about the same percentage of cable operators were unregistered. He would receive complaints of pornography being shown on TV in the middle of the day. A clean up was in order, but Rashid says the president also gave him another important assignment: to liaison with the broadcasters and establish a code of conduct by which the new medium would operate.

Pemra Ordinance 2007, the new laws introduced by the president that journalists were protesting last summer, were an aggressive attempt at this. They restricted live coverage and gave sweeping powers to Pemra to seize property and interrupt broadcasts. The ordinance also brought the authority, which had been an autonomous watchdog, under a government ministry. Following the uproar by journalists (media owners were largely silent), Rashid offered to put the laws in cold storage. He suggested to the Pakistan Broadcasters Association that they come up with a "voluntary code of conduct" that could replace the ordinance. If the media would police itself, Rashid says like a seasoned law enforcer, there would be no policing left to do.

Some in the industry, like Shakeel Masood, the CEO of Dawn TV, sensed this as an opportunity. "Of course the government would like a dictate," Masood said. "'Here, you can talk about this, you can't talk about that.' But having this code is part of becoming a mature media." Even though the suspended Pemra ordinance and approximately $20 million in purported government election advertising was held like a gun to the media's temple through the negotiations, Masood was hopeful. "It'll be something permanent but we need to get it done before the elections," he said at the time. The media couldn't afford to have this unsettled, he said, while covering what might be the most important election in the country's history.

Even as negotiations over the code of conduct proceeded, television's honeymoon with the military came to an ugly end. On the evening of Nov. 4, Pakistanis found all satellite news channels suddenly taken off the air. President Musharraf had finally declared a "state of emergency" -- effectively a military coup against his own government -- days before the Supreme Court was expected to rule against his eligibility to stay in power. The ruling would have tipped the institutional balance of power against the military for the first time in the country's history. Preempting this, the General crushed the judiciary, firing a majority of its judges, and placing Chief Justice Chaudhry under house arrest again. The parliament stayed in place, as did the civil bureaucracy and the police forces. The only other institution targeted was the broadcast media.

But it wasn't going to be easy to tame the monster Musharraf himself had created. Protests erupted immediately across the country with people -- journalists and the public who had come to depend on them -- demanding the return of independent TV news channels as well as the reinstatement of the Supreme Court judges. GEO's orange, blue and white logo became a badge of resistance and the channel's popular faces, including Hamid Mir, took their show on the road and continued taping their programs in front of live audiences at protest rallies attended by hundreds, sometimes thousands. "Endless war till the media are freed," they chanted.

"By shutting private media down, they thought they could control the political message," said Adnan Rehmat, the Pakistan country director for Internews, a media advocacy and watchdog group based in Washington, D.C., a few days after the declaration of emergency. "But this just isn't sustainable," he said. The government was just digging its own grave by cultivating a "credibility deficit."

This credibility gap manifested itself in a general air of uncertainty. With no real credible source of information available anymore, rumors replaced news. One morning, a few days after the coup, rumors of a counter coup against Musharraf became so rampant that the President had to publicly deny them. "People have become very used to knowing," explained Rehmat. "You can't just take that away from them. It won't work."

Rehmat was right. The sacking of the judiciary and the gagging of the media made a struggling regime even less popular. Within a few weeks the state began loosening its grip and the TV channels started coming back on the air one by one. The ban still lasted much longer than most people expected and was an important victory for Musharraf. The channels came back on air only after signing on the dreaded dotted line: A code of conduct typed out at Pemra offices.

After the emergency Pemra had caught the broadcasters at their weakest. The financial cost of being off-air was simply too much for some smaller outfits to bear. GEO held out the longest but it also had to return, compromised, a few weeks after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, which pushed back the election to February 2008. Under rules that were never publicly disclosed, Hamid Mir and a handful of other journalists were banned from appearing on air and any discussion of the dismissed judges was off limits. No criticism of the armed forces or the President was allowed.

Bruised and battered, the channels returned with only days left before what many were calling the most important election in the country's history. All this happened as major cities and towns were under a barrage of suicide bombings. Everyone, not just the broadcasters, looked to the elections, hoping this time democracy would work.

Looking out his office window onto Constitution Avenue a few months before the elections, Hamid Mir seemed pensive. The prospect of a return of democracy brought back memories for him, not all of them good. He lost his job at the Jang newspaper in the mid-1990s, thanks to then-Prime Minister Bhutto, the day after he broke the news that a contract to purchase submarines had allegedly made Bhutto's family $120 million richer. A few years later he lost his job again under the democratic rule of Nawaz Sharif, for exposing more government corruption. "But we have to, for our own sake, strengthen democracy," he said, his thick expressive eyebrows rising. "We can't survive without a strong parliament and without a strong judiciary. We can't be at the mercy of one man. It's our prime responsibility -- we do have a watchdog role."

Thanks in part to this bruised self-styled watchdog, Pakistan held a peaceful election in February. Most international observers judged it fair and the mood was celebratory in newsrooms and the living rooms they were broadcasting into. Musharraf's power in the legislature had been wiped out. The big winners, Nawaz Sharif and Bhutto widower Asif Zardari, made a point to thank the media for its role in helping in the return of democracy. But for now the television channels appeared uninterested in forging any political alliances. It seems they are throwing their chips in elsewhere.

The day after the election GEO-TV began running a public service message on the hour. A voice, over sepia images of ordinary Pakistanis casting votes, congratulated the nation and the elected leaders on the peaceful election process. Then the voiceover addressed the two victorious leaders, notorious for their corruption and scandal:

"The nation has trusted you now. You are the ones who have to bear the burden of these expectations. So promise that justice for all will be your first priority. Even if the law finds you guilty of crimes in the process. Promise that corruption will be eradicated at every cost, even if the focus falls on you."

A long list of demands for justice and fair play followed, with this final note: "Promise that media will be given the freedom to inform the public and bring opposing points of views to them, so that the people can know how their mandate is being put to work... because the nation has elected you for this. This is what they expect of you. Live up to this and jeeo."

Pakistan's television news media have managed to emerge as a deeply flawed but essential pillar of whatever kind of democracy Pakistan ultimately embraces. But it is difficult to say precisely where this pillar will stand in relation to the others, or at whose expense its power will grow. The journalists at these news operations continue to struggle with pressures -- both internal and external -- to use their power in support of someone else's agenda, whether the judiciary's, the opposition's, or the state's.

None of these established political institutions have ever really faithfully represented the people of Pakistan though. Now, the news media has emerged as one powerful institution that seems most interested in becoming a vanguard for ordinary Pakistanis' struggle for democracy and fair play. It's hard to say what Pakistan's young TV news media will grow into, but if it manages to find the right balance, the real winners might just be the people of Pakistan.

Shahan Mufti is a freelance writer based in New York who travels frequently to Pakistan. This article is adapted, with permission, from a story first published in the November/December 2007 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review.

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