Pakistan TV channels off the air in Chief Justice sacking aftermath

Pak government blacks out TV channels for airing police action on protesters; Chief Justice assaulted by security men.

BY A CORRESPONDENT

March 12, 2007: The Pakistan government blacked out two popular television channels for hours and stepped up pressure on the managements to dismiss their anchors.

This followed the two channels’ coverage of the rising protests against the sacking of the Chief Justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court.

“I am mentally prepared that today is the last day of my show as I am personally aware of the pressure being exhorted on my management,” Hamid Mir, who anchors the popular Capital Talk programme on Geo TV, said on Tuesday.

Geo TV and its rival Aaj TV were banned on March 12, 2007, and the two channels went out off the air for several hours after they declined the instructions from the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority, (PEMRA) to stop coverage of the bloody lathi-charge (beating with cane) on the agitating lawyers.

In the lathi-charge, many lawyers, including opposition Pakistan People’s Party Senator and advocate Lathif Khan Khosa, suffered head injuries.

Photographs of a bleeding Khosa flashing a victory sign with his blood-covered hands were splashed on the front pages of the newspapers on Tuesday.

Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf dismissed Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftakar Muhammad Choudhary on charges of “misconduct and misuse” of authority on March 9, six years before his term was to end, and a judicial panel will hear charges against him.

Hamid Mir, anchor, said he has already told his colleagues in the office that they should be prepared for the bad news.

Also under the scanner was Kamran Khan, another anchor of Geo TV, as well as popular anchors of Aaj TV.

Journalists of both the channels allege that PEMRA put pressure on their editors to stop the telecast of the protests and, when they refused to oblige, the government told the 200-odd cable operators across Pakistan to black out the two channels.

Pakistan government controls the television channels through the cable operators as most of the popular private TV channels telecast their programmes through satellite transmission from Dubai and London.

“We refused to succumb to PEMRA’s pressure and continued to telecast the footage of the lathi-charge and they took us off air,” a top journalist of Aaj TV, who requested anonymity, told reporters.

The ban on Geo TV and Aaj TV was lifted only after Pakistan’s Information Minister Muhammad Ali Durani intervened to arrange a compromise under which both channels were asked to air the footage of the injuries suffered by policemen when some of the lawyers threw stones at them.