What's on Pakistan TV talk shows? Extremists.

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A man is seen through the bullet-riddled glass door of a mosque on premise of a district city court where gunmen attacked police escorting prisoners in Karachi, Pakistan on June 19.


What's on Pakistan TV talk shows? Extremists.
By Issam Ahmed, Correspondent / June 23, 2010
Lahore, Pakistan

When Taliban militants stormed two minority-sect mosques in Lahore last month, Pakistani television crews swung into action, breaking police lines to document a dramatic siege that left 95 people dead. What they left out of the coverage highlights the Pakistani media's increasingly belligerent bent.

Reporters refrained from honoring these victims, part of the frequently persecuted Ahmadi sect of Islam, with the title shaheed, or martyr, as they had done for thousands of others killed in militant violence in recent years. Nor did they refer to the places of worship as mosques. TV news programs downplayed the sectarian nature of the attack. Some instead accused India of trying to undermine Pakistan on the anniversary of successful nuclear tests, or America for fomenting instability to expand its presence in the country.

While Pakistani media are banned by law from recognizing Ahmadis as Muslims, their apparent lack of sympathy for the victims underscored the growing dominance of a worldview that's rooted more in the country's conservative religious seminaries than its Western-oriented universities. Nowhere is this more evident than in a bevy of news and talk shows that promote anti-Americanism, the idea of a transnational Islamic government, and minority bashing.

“These (programs) need to be looked at and reviewed. Instead of demonizing the Taliban, they glamorize them,” says Sherry Rehman, a lawmaker from the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and former minister of information.

As in Pakistan, American media has its share of rabble-rousers, such as radio host Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News host Glenn Beck, whom the Anti-Defamation League has called America's “fearmonger-in-chief." But they don't talk openly about links with religious militants.