Newspaper Headlines

The front page main headline of an English daily says 10 and 7 years while that of another Urdu daily, claiming to be with the largest circulation, calls it 11 and 8 year sentences for MNS and Mariam Nawaz respectively.  Whom to believe and whom not to believe? On the other hand the electronic media had been incessantly reporting the sentences to be of 10 years and 7 years for the past 24 hours.  I understand the front page headline of a newspaper is  just not picked up randomly and is deliberated upon by many editors and editor-in-chief etc. before it is finally approved to be cast on the front page. As such it can’t be called “an inadvertent” oversight of some piddling of a sub editor or so.  It is by all counts a deliberate and measured misreporting.  If such inaccuracies are to be found in the front page headlines then what all garbage and deliberate wrong reporting, (read misreporting) would not be contained in such dailies.&n! bsp;  And if it was on purpose, which it seemingly looks to be, then one would like to know the motive and the intentions of the daily for such wrong reporting ?

(I don’t think any daily would publish my this letter. Yet, who knows there might still be some gutful editor to publish it)

Col.Riaz Jafri (Retd)