The worst form of censorship is killing journalists, say Pakistani journalists

Xari Jalil

Dawn

Publication Date : 03-10-2014

Censorship in Pakistan appears in many forms, but of them is the worst is: intimidating, threatening, torturing and even killing journalists.

Media analyst Adnan Rehmat said this at a seminar on Media Ethics in the Time of Threat on Thursday. The seminar was held by Rozans Secretariat of Pakistan Coalition for Ethical Journalism with the Digital Rights Foundation and the Human Right Commission of Pakistan.

Rehmat said censorship today had become much worse than ever when even cable operators who were not content producers could easily block out channels on their own.

He read out excerpts from his book Reporting Under Threat, where the compelling personal accounts of three journalists were highlighted. Later these journalists -- Shumaila Jafary (BBC), Rana Azeem (PFUJ), and Yousuf Ali (The News) spoke as part of a panel.

Rehmat said telling stories was important as they helped us understand what the ground reality was. The job of journalists is to tell these stories but they faced several dangers in uncovering these stories.

A free media is intrinsic of an open society and a democracy, where people can freely communicate and air their opinions and issues, he said. Unfortunately, he said, journalists were threatened commonly by non-state actors and sometimes by the government too in different ways, and in 2002 UNESCO recorded that 612 journalists were killed globally, of them 10 per cent of them were from Pakistan.

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The worst form of censorship is killing journalists, say Pakistani journalists