From The New York Times
by Declan Walsh
LONDON — For a time, Pakistan’s journalists were seen as messy champions of democracy: brave if sometimes flawed truth-tellers who helped oust the military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf and held up a critical mirror to their tempestuous country.
But a vicious gun attack last weekend on Hamid Mir, the country’s most famous television newscaster, seems to have changed everything, setting off a divisive media battle in which the truth itself has become bitterly contested.
At issue are claims aired by Geo News, Mr. Mir’s employer and the largest station, that the military’s powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, was behind the April 19 attack in which Mr. Mir was shot six times as he traveled to a Karachi television studio.
Even staunch ISI critics thought the station’s personalized attacks, which singled out the ISI spy chief as the culprit, were hasty and premature, especially at a time when Islamist militants were also targeting reporters.
But rival stations took the controversy a step further, using it to cudgel Geo and question Mr. Mir’s motives — one station even suggested he engineered the shooting as a publicity stunt — at a time when the ISI was formally trying to have Geo shut down for good.
The vituperative exchanges have exposed troubling aspects of Pakistan’s oft-lauded media revolution: Along with the military’s concerted campaign to muzzle the press is the heavy hand of querulous media barons who, driven by commercial concerns and personal grudges, may be endangering the sector they helped create.
“The way this has played out is extremely disturbing,” said Zaffar Abbas, editor of Dawn newspaper, one of the few media outlets that have stayed out of the dispute. “I’ve never seen the media like this, really going after one other. If better sense doesn’t prevail, whatever we have earned in press freedom will be lost.”
