Assalaam'alaykum
Since General Musharraf took over, the media has been given unprecedented freedoms. New channels and papers and magazines are opening all the time. Yet despite the heavy investments being made into our news outlets, the quality of coverage, accuracy of reporting and honesty of opinions being broadcast and written by Pakistani companies has not improved, in my opinion, at all.
Take a look at the Dawn's business section. On any day you will have ten reports of tremendous new investments, budget surplus, successfull reaching of CBR's revenue targets, etc. But then you will have one or two articles that are not news reports but in fact editorials that lament the sorry state of the nation and how everyone is starving, bankrupt, unemployed and no one has money for new shoes. Forget the fact that a professional newspaper with any semblance of standards would never put personal opinions and anecdotal evidence into an article that goes into the "NEWS" section, does the DAWN not see the hypocrisy in reporting all these positive articles that highlight the strength of our economy and national outlook and then throwing in an editorial in the guise of a news report written by someone with a clear anti-Musharraf agenda.
And lets not forget the quality of the writing. How many times will we have to suffer a poorly written and incoherent report from some of Pakistan's leading news outlets?
I think that there ought to be an Honesty and Integrity in Reporting Commission whose sole purpose is to hold news media to a high standard.