Islamabad: Amid spiraling protests against the sacking of Supreme Court Chief Justice, Pakistan government has turned its ire on the media for its coverage of the events, blacking out two popular TV channels for hours and stepping up pressure on managements to sack their anchors.
"I am mentally prepared that today is the last day of my show as I am personally aware of the pressure being exhorted on my management," Hamid Mir, who anchors the popular Capital Talk programme on Geo TV, told PTI.
Geo TV and its arch rival Aaj TV were banned on Monday and the two channels went out off the air for several hours after they declined the instructions from the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority, (PEMRA) to stop coverage of the bloody lathi-charge on the agitating lawyers in which several of them including opposition Pakistan People Party (PPP) Senator and Advocate Lathif Khan Khosa sustained head injuries.
Photographs of bleeding Khosa flashing a victory sign with his blood soaked hands were splashed on front pages of the newspapers on Tuesday.
President Pervez Musharraf sacked Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftakar Muhammad Choudhary on charges of "misconduct and misuse" of authority on March 9, six years before his term was to end, and a judicial panel will hear charges against him.
Mir an editor of Urdu daily turned anchor said he has already told his colleagues in the office that they should be prepared for the bad news.
Also under the scanner was another anchor of the same Geo TV Kamran Khan and popular anchors of Aaj TV.
Journalists of both the channels claimed that PEMRA put pressure on their editors to stop the telecast of the protests and when they refused to oblige, the government told the 200 odd cable operators across the country to blackout the two channels.
Pakistan government controls the TV channels through the cable operators as most of the popular private TV channels telecast their programmes through satellite transmission from Dubai and London.
"We refused to succumb to PEMRA's pressure and continued to telecast the footage of the lathi-charge and they took us off air," a top journalist of Aaj TV who requested anonymity told PTI.
The ban was lifted only after Information Minister Muhammad Ali Durani intervened to arrange a compromise under which both the channels were asked to air the footage of the injuries sustained by police when some of the lawyers threw stones at them.
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