New voices complete the news from Pakistan

Last month we saw citizen journalists in Myanmar take on a media quarantine with cell phones and laptops, feeding reports of riots and police violence on the ground to snubbed news organizations abroad.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has implemented some censorship to complement his state-of-emergency declaration. With the lines cut on several of Pakistan’s independent news outlets, many citizens have only the state-controlled media to keep them current on the increasingly tenuous resistance unfolding on their streets. And outside Pakistan’s borders, the communication pipelines feeding Western audiences are often muddled by the U.S.’s ambiguous allegiance to Musharraf.

As it did in Myanmar, Web journalism here fills an important void. Bloggers’ as-of-yet unregulated capacity to disseminate alternate perspectives and additional reporting offers hope for greater comprehension of the situation on the ground in Pakistan.

Sure, The Los Angeles Times had the story on Musharraf/Bhutto rival Nawaz Sharif’s return to Pakistan yesterday. But no mention of the neo-Taliban suicide bombs that took 30 lives in Rawalpindi, the third such attack in as many months. And good luck grasping the ever-tangling nuances of Pakistan’s election landscape from quick reports on cable news channels.

For those angles, Pakistani citizens, international journalists and foreign politicians alike have bookmarked sites such as The Pakistan Policy Blog for reliable, all-things-Pakistan dispatches. OJR caught up with PPB editor Arif Rafiq for his take on covering Pakistan and the role of non-MSM outlets in the fray.

Online Journalism Review: Can you start by telling me a little about your site, The Pakistan Policy Blog? How long have you been live, and what was your founding vision for the site?

Arif Rafiq: The Pakistan Policy Blog went live in August 2007. The site serves as a dedicated source of analysis and commentary on Pakistan’s politics and in doing so, it fills a major void.

I came to the understanding in August that Pakistan would be going through a critical period of change into at least January 2008. These changes would not only shape Pakistan’s future immensely, but they would also be of great interest to Western—particularly American—observers. It would serve the interests of publics and policy communities in the U.S. and Pakistan to have a more informed and engaged discourse. And that’s what I seek to do with the site.

OJR: Who are your readers, and how has site traffic behaved since Musharraf’s “state-of-emergency” declaration?

AR: Our readers seem to come from four major segments: 1) Educated and concerned Pakistani expatriates living in the the West or Gulf; 2) Government officials in Pakistan, the United States and other Western countries, and India; 3) Western journalists covering Pakistan or U.S. foreign policy; 4) Foreign policy bloggers.

Site traffic has increased considerably since Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency and has remained relatively high.

OJR: What cultural and political background is missing from the coverage the Western audience gets from the U.S. mainstream media? Where can they find it? Who is covering it well?

AR: Most U.S. MSM journalists covering Pakistan don’t have the requisite language skills, i.e. they can’t speak and understand Urdu, and they also haven’t covered Pakistan for long. That puts a greater burden on their local stringers and sources. Coverage of Pakistan has been traditionally weak, but due to the sustained focus on the country in recent weeks, that weakness has declined considerably. The requisite skepticism and knowledge of Pakistan’s cyclical political history seems to have been achieved by many of them.

Fortunately, Pakistan is not like Iraq and so you don’t the equivalent of American journalists writing from the Green Zone or embedded with coalition forces. They are largely free to move and benefit from the sizable English-speaking population there (as stringers, sources, etc.

Television coverage in the U.S. has been weak. That’s probably due to the nature of the medium. American television is one of the last places, I believe, where one should look for an accurate and informative outlook on the world.

OJR: To what extent are you in touch with the Pakistani media outlets? Bloggers and citizen journalists? Any prominent bloggers doing a particularly good job of disseminating information outside Pakistan’s borders?

AR: I haven’t had considerable interaction with Pakistani media outlets, bloggers or citizen journalists. Many sites have come out as a result of the emergency rule, but I would say the better ones (such as All Things Pakistan) have been around before that. There are many blogs made by young Pakistanis, such as The Emergency Times, that provide an important on-the-ground perspective. Their emergence reflects the sort of spontaneous rising of Pakistani civil society immediately after the imposition of emergency rule; but I would say Pakistanis would also be served well by more standardized or ‘professional’ blogs.

Another site, Pkpolitics.com, is particularly notable as it has been providing video of Pakistani public affairs TV programs. Its utility has declined however since Musharraf pulled the plug on the two leading private news channels.

OJR: Any sense of how they’re dealing with Musharraf’s independent-media crackdown on the ground there?

AR: Bloggers haven’t been targeted by the media crackdown, but it is conceivable that the government could begin banning certain websites. At this point, the government’s major focus as been the private print and television media. A major target has been the Jang Group, which operates two leading newspapers (The News in English and Jang in Urdu) and a television network, including GEO.

OJR: You link to live Pakistani TV from stations Aaj TV, TV One and Hum TV. Why those particular stations? How have the media restrictions in Pakistan affected traffic to that section? Any particular reason you went with JumpTV for that feature?

AR: I link to those stations because, at the time, they were among the few channels that were provided for free over the Internet legally. JumpTV was their chosen provider. One of the channels, AAJ, isn’t available via cable or satellite in North America. And I found its public affairs programming more appealing than some of the other Pakistani channels. Unfortunately, after governmental pressure, AAJ has suspended those programs (Live with Talat and Bolta Pakistan).