Behind the Chairman’s Door

Attorneys attack the media

ARYOne World is currently breaking the story with the footage of members of the Karachi Bar Association practicing vigilante justice on the journalists from ARY, Indus TV and other channels.

Geo TV, the nation’s largest television news channel, has put the story on their website:

KARACHI: The lawyers here losing temper for reasons yet unknown attacked journalists, beat them up, broken their camera, tore their clothes and drove them away bleeding from their protest rally, which they had staged against the presidential reference and making the Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry non-function.

The rallies coming out from the Sindh High Court and the City Court reached M.A. Jinnah Road, when some persons in black coat thrashed a camera man of a private television and broke his camera, which the journalists strongly protested and boycotted the coverage of the lawyers’ rally. Later, some persons from among the rally reaching near Quaid’s mausoleum once again attacked the journalists with sticks and injured several of them.

The lawyers held a meeting at the Quaid’s mausoleum and thereon dispersed peacefully, while the journalists staging a sit-in for some time on the M.A. Jinnah Road resenting the lawyers’ perpetration of violence on them and the police and administration remaining silent spectators, also dispersed peacefully.

What I find funny, is that it was the journalist community that was the first to support the attorney’s strike against the referendum against the suspended Chief Justice and today, they become the targets of the aggression.

Like I said in a previous post, the problem with Pakistan is that the attorneys are just as corrupt as the police, so who are you to trust? After today, never an attorney.

Those of you that remember a few weeks back when the Geo offices were attacked in Islamabad, the entire world condemned the Pakistani government and the police for not doing anything to protect the free media. The international media even dared to suggest that President Musharraf or his government was behind the attack on Geo because of its open journalistic policies. Yet, BBC, CNN and the other international networks that were quick to break that story have not even reported this.

Where in the CNN story or BBC story about the hearing today in Islamabad have you mentioned the attack on the media in Karachi? Is that just not newsworthy or does the international media not have the time to cover the rest of the story?

Where are your international correspondents now that were screaming that the attack on the Geo offices was an attack on the freedom of the press?

Why haven’t any of your channels picked up this attack on the media?

In your opinion, is this justifiable when it is not the government or the police doling out the justice?