PAKISTAN:Tight censorship - particularly of Urdu TV news shows - is choking debate at the height of election season, writes Laura Kingin Karachi
It's the height of election season, and Pakistani television audiences might expect the airwaves to be crackling with live campaign coverage, argumentative talk shows and feisty political commentary.
Instead, two weeks before the country's most hotly contested parliamentary vote in years, broadcasters continue to operate under a stringent code of conduct imposed by the president, Pervez Musharraf, during a six-week period of de facto martial law, which ended earlier this month.
Political activists, human rights organisations and media groups believe the restrictions, set to remain in place indefinitely, seriously diminish prospects for a free and fair election.
"Being on the air is not the same as being free," said Ali Dayan Hasan, a Pakistan-based representative of the New York-based group Human Rights Watch. "The coverage is quite circumscribed, quite sanitized and not at all conducive to helping people make informed decisions about their political future."
At the outset of emergency rule, one of Musharraf's early moves was to jam the signals of dozens of independent TV and radio channels. Most have been allowed to resume broadcasting, but the most widely watched Urdu-language news channel, Geo, remains banned. In rural Pakistan in particular, Urdu news programmes are a powerful force in shaping opinion.
In order to get back on the air, broadcasters had to agree to refrain from live coverage, including that of candidates' speeches at political rallies. Popular politics-themed talk shows were dropped from the programming schedules. Defaming Musharraf or the army is now punishable by fines or imprisonment.
After a flowering of media freedom in the past five years, the crackdown is difficult for many to swallow.
"Imagine an election without free media," said Talat Hussain, an experienced journalist whose daily current affairs talk show on the Aaj television channel was cancelled as a result of government pressure. "For us, it's not so much a professional setback as sheer embarrassment that such a thing is happening in our country."
Guest commentators who appear regularly on talk shows say they are being warned that certain topics remain off limits, including the state of emergency, during which Musharraf suspended the constitution, jailed thousands of opponents and fired dozens of senior judges.
"When I arrived for a taping, I was instructed not to mention or refer in any way to President Musharraf," said Tauseef Ahmed Khan, an analyst and columnist who teaches mass communications at Urdu University in Karachi. "That makes it very hard to talk about what is happening."
The enforcement of the code of conduct is inconsistent, media observers say. The restrictions have fallen most heavily on Urdu-language stations, the main source of news and information in a country where almost half the population is illiterate.
"On TV, you see coverage of candidates out campaigning, but it's made to appear that the government-backed ones are equal in popularity to the opposition ones," said Waris Raza of the Urdu-language channel ARY.
He said reporters and producers routinely receive threatening telephone calls from bureaucrats or army representatives when the news coverage is perceived to have crossed a line.
English-language outlets, which are seen by a much smaller audience made up mainly of educated urban elites, appear less affected by the restrictions.
Rights activists and analysts argue that the government is well aware that an English-language channel like Dawn is seen by diplomats and foreign journalists, and allowing it relative freedom gives an impression of normality in campaign coverage.
"You have to see the channels watched by the masses to be aware of what is happening, to see how very restrictive it all is," said Hasan, of Human Rights Watch.
Print journalism has been less affected as well, most likely for the same reason, said journalist and author Ahmed Rashid.
"The crackdown has not been so much against the newspapers," he said.
"Obviously there's self-censorship, and a lot of telephone calls coming from the Ministry of Information. But in terms of the election and its outcome, what appears in print certainly does not have the impact of what's seen on the Urdu channels."
When Musharraf took the private channels off the air, he accused news outlets of "glorifying" suicide bombers with sensational coverage. Some analysts, though, say that in the run-up to the vote it suits the government to limit coverage of the ongoing confrontation with Islamic militants, which is an unpopular cause among many Pakistani voters.
Rashid, who has written extensively about militant groups including the Taliban, said television coverage of a suicide attack last Friday at a mosque in the restive North-West Frontier province was "very subdued" despite the fact that more than 50 people died.