Shameful curbs on coverage of the CJ issue

The government's refusal to restore the Chief Justice has been followed by more disgraceful conduct, this time in the form of controls on the media to prevent proper live coverage of the CJ's recent visit to Karachi and Hyderabad on Oct 18 and then the gathering of the lawyers at the SC in Islamabad on Oct 20. The media is also being pressurized to relegate the CJ issue to the back burner by not giving relevant news in full detail and hiding whatever news it provides in the middle instead of including it as one of the top stories.

Coming from a so called democratic government, which claims to believe in the freedom of media, this is very deplorable. The PPP and its political allies must realize that the unwillingness to restore the CJ, the dirty tactics of controlling the media, repeatedly breaking clear promises and then trivializing those promises as "political statements" or "not words in The Quran" is exactly the kind of behaviour that undermines public confidence in the political process and repeatedly allows the military the opportunity to intervene. It also does little to improve the confidence of the investors and the general public in the economy since they do not know if the incentives and guarantees being offered to them by the government are credible or whether they are going to meet the same fate as the broken commitments to fully reinstate all the judges.

Instead of trying to control the media through underhand tactics, the PPP should unconditionally restore the CJ. Full, uninterrupted live coverage of the whole Nov 3 event should be allowed on all news channels, including PTV and Radio Pakistan.