The Sorry State of Fact Checking

The saddest fact about Pakistani media today, be it print media or electronic, is that everyone is free to peddle whatever horse-manure they want to present as facts and no one questions them. One can bear these pseudo facts being paddled by tabloid writers. But when someone who is called a senior analyst, who has also been a federal minister of Pakistan, is writing things without doing due diligence, one wonders where are the people whose job is it to scrutinize every thing being published as a fact.

Case in question; the column by Dr. Babar Awan in Dunya Newspaper. He has leveled so many allegations, like Nawaz Sharif's stay in New York costimg $18,000 per night and also every cab in NYC brandishing "Go Nawaz Go" label. Here is the column he wrote

http://e.dunya.com.pk/colum.php?date=2014-09-29&edition=LHR&id=37809_52056642

I have written enough already about the hotel cost. Let me talk about "Har Taxi per Go Nawaz Go ka board laga tha". Someone posted a photo-shopped picture of an NYC cab advertising "Go Nawaz Go" and Dr. Babur Awan got so excited looking at that tempered image that he proclaimed that EVERY taxi cab in NYC was displaying that. Well, I was there in that city that day and I didn't see a single taxi cab with that advertisement; most of them were still displaying ads for strip clubs.

Dr. Babur Awan thinks that every Pakistani cab driver can display whatever he wants on his cab. That is not the case. Taxi cabs in New York City are regulated by the Taxi & Limousine Commission (T&LC  and that is inscribed on the license plate of every cab in NYC) and no cab driver can display anything on the cab without the approval of T&LC. If they had done that, as Dr. Babur Awan is saying that they did, they would have lost their driving licenses by the next day.

This may seem like a trivial and frivolous issue but it's symptomatic of a very troubling trend. Pakistan has suffered long enough of "creative" reporting of  history. In past few years that creative reporting has been increasingly creeping into current affairs. It's troubling and dangerous because a nation mired into identity crises and looking to get it's bearing needs to at least have their facts reported correctly.

This is  not an individual problem, it is an institutional one. An individual can write whatever their fancy. Dr. Babur Awan can write that angels were descending on New York with "Go Nawaz Go" placards. It's the responsibility of the institution that is sending those words to the press to verify what is being published. Western news outlets have someone called a "content editor" whose primary job is to verify the facts being published. Back in the days when I was a journalist in Pakistan, we didn't have content editors but it was common for a news editor or editor to circle a piece in an article with red and ask the reporter or the writer if that part was verified by the writer.

I am of firm belief that that tradition must have gone by the wayside too because in two days, the day Dr. Babar Awan's article got published and the day before, in the same opinion page of the same newspaper, three writers quoted three different room rates for Waldorf Astoria hotel. All three were wrong but even if one was correct, the other two had to be wrong which made me wonder, what was the editor of the opinion page smoking? Why didn't he/she asked these three writers how come their "facts" didn't match each other, let alone matching the
reality.

No wonder that Pakistani journalism is going through an epic credibility crises of unprecedented proportion which makes people like me sad to the core who once prided themselves of once having some link to the journalistic profession of Pakistan.