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A glaring example of how ISI dictates Pakistani newspapers: The case of a missing WikiLeak cable

Let Us Build Pakistan rightly claims that ‘Jang group’ is inherently biased against democratic politics, is continuously propagating misconceptions about Pakistan Peoples Party led civilian government and is also preaching hate toward neighbor countries. It is basic journalistic principle that news should be reported in neutral terms and published after cross verification but this group always ignored basic journalistic principles i.e(fact-checking/two independent sources rule).

Global leaders and all the concerned citizens of the world are continuously praising Julian Assange by saying that he is doing better work than many journalists and diplomats and they also questioning his arrest. It appears every person who believes in democracy and freedom suporting WikiLeaks showing concern for Julian Assange and declaring him as a real hero of Cyber-Age.

A former CIA agent whose duties included briefing the first President Bush and Ronald Reagan, has written an open letter of support for WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.

Ray McGovern told Close Up he considers Assange to be a hero for “challenging the empire”

McGovern says WikiLeaks is doing the job the mainstream media has stopped doing. And WikiLeaks has given the public an “incredible” insight into the reality of what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan

“Why was Mr. Assange hidden in prison?” Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin asked at a news conference. “Is this democracy?”

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Thursday in Brasilia. “There is nothing, nothing for freedom of expression and against the imprisonment of this guy who was doing better work than many of the ambassadors.”

“The brave man was arrested because he was exposing the real face of the big powers,” Tariq Naeemullah said.

Hundreds of protesters gathered in three Australian cities today to rage against the arrest of Julian Assange. Some wearing face masks, they marched, chanted and waved banners as they called for the release of the WikiLeaks founder.

The government was branded “sycophants to the US” for condemning Mr Assange’s website while campaigners raised $250,000 to buy advertisements in the New York Times supporting him.

Protesters also criticised his arrest in Britain, during rallies in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

Many see his detention as an attempt to hinder the continued release of hundreds of thousands of government files through WikiLeaks.

“Assange is a hero of our time, telling truth is not a crime,” the marchers chanted.

WikiLeaks supporters have vowed to wreak havoc on companies that are deemed as enemies of the whistleblowing website, and UK’s biggest online retailer Amazon has been cited as the next target.

It’s interesting to note that WikiLeaks has won awards including the 2008 Freedom of Expression award from the Index on Censorship and the2009 Amnesty International human rights reporting award.

A day after his arrest in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has defended his website. In his op-ed Assange says democracies require strong media to keep governments honest, and WikiLeaks plays a role in this.

WikiLeaks has also provoked fury in Washington for publishing some of the 250,000 documents it has obtained from US embassies around the world -and have caused traditional media outlets to rethink how they report on sensitive information. The New York Times released a statement explaining that it believes that the “documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match”. It went on to acknowledge the reality though that if it did not publish the documents another newspaper inevitably would with the United Kingdom’s The Guardian, France’s Le Monde, and Spain’s El Paris all granted access. In some ways the exclusive publication of these documents has also driven jealousy amongst the media with independent journalist Anthony Lowensteinsuggesting reporters lack a backbone in challenging government condemnations.

The U.N.’s top human rights official raised the alarm Thursday over officials’ and corporations’ moves to cut off WikiLeaks’ funding and starve it of server space – something she described as “potentially violating WikiLeaks’ right to freedom of expression.”

Navi Pillay also expressed surprise at the scale of the online attacks that have targeted major American financial players – in some cases denying access to their websites for hours at a time.

“It’s truly what media would call a cyber-war. It’s just astonishing what is happening,” Pillay told reporters in Geneva.

Pillay said if WikiLeaks had broken the law “then this should be handled through the legal system and not through pressure and intimidation.”

Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks show us what democracy should be about: transparency. Governments should be ashamed of the gulf between what they say in public an what they say behind closed doors.

The flow of online support has also sparked some solidarity on the streets. One pro-WikiLeaks protest in Australia sent about 250 demonstrators into the streets of Brisbane, surprisingly even in the central Pakistani city of Multan, dozens took to the streets to protest Assange’s detention.

And, on the contrary the whole world condemning ‘Jang Group’ for its policies and Latest Fakeleaks. If there’s anything more exiciting than real WikiLeaks revelations, it’s fake ones, interestingly this cable not revealed by Wikileaks but our leading publishing groups, who have been continuously advocating for ‘sovereignty’ and ‘self reliance’ , so keeping these high values in mind they recently invented their own ‘cablegate’, and here it’s first revelation, “Enough evidence of Indian involvement in Waziristan, Balochistan,” read the front-page story in the News; an almost identical story appeared in the Urdu-language Jang, Pakistan’s bestselling daily. So ‘proudly creator’ can brand it like ‘Mickeyleaks’ .

On Thursday, Pakistan was shaken as the front pages of several of its major dailies were splashed with damning WikiLeaks stories accusing the Indian government of conspiring with Hindu fundamentalists and supporting Islamist militants in Pakistani tribal regions. Other cables described India’s top generals as “as vain, egotistical and genocidal,” while in the same breath lavishing praise on Pakistani generals.

The Australian in it’s Op-Ed writes, IN the maelstrom of competing WikiLeaks revelations, the temptation to gild the lily was probably always going to be too great to resist.

And so it proved for a few of Pakistan’s more enthusiastic media players, who yesterday cited leaked US diplomatic cables describing senior Indian generals as egotistical and genocidal, and linking Indian intelligence agencies to the Taliban insurgency in Waziristan and the Balochistan separatist movement.

According to the BBC report, Pakistani newspapers have admitted they were hoaxed after publishing reports based on fake Wikileaks cables containing anti-Indian propaganda.

PTI, reporting from Islamabad, said the papers had “reproduced an elaborate Internet hoax”. The Guardian, which is one of the newspapers partnering with WikiLeaks in the publication of the cables, said the reports could be “the first case of WikiLeaks being exploited for propaganda purposes”.

The Guardian which first published the cables have now proved that the reports in Pakistani dailies are fake and not accurate. Guardian did it own searches and here’s what it published after that:

An extensive search of the WikiLeaks database by the Guardian by date, name and keyword failed to locate any of the incendiary allegations.

It suggests this is the first case of WikiLeaks being exploited for propaganda purposes.

The controversial claims, published in four Pakistani national papers, were credited to the Online Agency, an Islamabad-based news service that has frequently run pro-army stories in the past.

No journalist is bylined.
Red-faced, Pakistan newspapers and websites retracted the fake WikiLeaks stories they published yesterday and apologised saying they regret publishing the stories.

The English-language Express Tribune newspaper, a Pakistani affiliate of the International Herald Tribune, published a front-page retraction.

The daily said it “deeply regrets publishing this story without due verification and apologises profusely for any inconvenience”.

But Urdu daily Jang, which had reported the fake Wikileaks story on its front page, did not mention it on Friday.

Surely it requires no profound wisdom or special knowledge about Journalism and communication to see fundamental flaws in ‘News Reporting’, even layman can easily detect jang group’s bias against civilian democratic government and it’s anti peace propoganda by using simple journalistic techniques. If you review and analyze the content of it’s messages, it’s leading writer and columnist and jumping jack anchors always highlight negativity and one-sided version and mostly they don’t include alternative points of view and even they don’ t fairly and honestly present alternative arguments plus they deliberately ignore obviously conflicting arguments. they even used negative words and images to describe other points of view and ascribe negative motivations to alternative points of view.

Here is a really interesting  comment at ‘Cafe Pyala’ by Sagar:

Isn’t this the same group that promotes ‘Aman ki Asha’ jointly with

Times of India. Wonder why only Asha (hope) and why not actual Aman

itself? And how can someone claiming to promote ‘Aman’ call themselves

the ‘Jang’ group? Strange paradox.

Let Us Build Pakistan rightly claims that ‘Jang group’ is inherently biased toward democratic politics, it is continuously propagating misconceptions about Pakistan Peoples Party led elected civilian government and it is also preaching hate toward our neighbor countries. It is basic journalistic principle that news should be reported in neutral terms and published after cross verification but this group always ignored basic journalistic principles i.e(fact-checking/two independent sources rule).

And excellent suggestion by our fellow bloggers at “New Pakistan”:

This isn’t just about whether or not the media is reliable – it’s about whether or not the media is intentionally or unintentionally sabotaging our national security. In any other country that claims to view journalism as a serious institution, a scandal of this magnitude would result in massive sackings. It will be instructive to see whether or not Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman has the courage and the principles to clean house.

Because let’s face it. Jang Group is humiliated today, as is the entire nation. But if Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman doesn’t care about how his company and his nation look in the eyes of the rest of the world, he doesn’t have to do a thing. The people who read and believe this crap don’t read The Guardian, even if they do read English, so they likely don’t even know about the situation.

No matter what Jang decides to do internally, though, the courts should immediately begin an inquiry into this mess. Seriously, if there was ever a cause worthy of suo moto notice, is this not it? How can the FO expect India to be cooperative while Jang is running defamatory articles about them? We want the Americans to treat us with respect while Ansar Abbasi is on TV telling Moeed Pirzada that all this WikiLeaks stuff is a big American conspiracy and saying that there are no boundaries to the ruthlessness and carelessness of Americans. Where is Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman while all of this is happening?

If Jang Group wants to be a joke, that’s fine. They can continue selling all the fictions they want. But when they start publishing crap that undercuts the ability of government and military officials to do their jobs, that is where we need to draw the line. I strongly believe in a free media. And I strongly defend the right – even the responsibility – of the media to hold the government accountable. But I do NOT support the right for anyone in the media to SABOTAGE the government.

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