(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
Figure 3. Readership and radio and TV audience reach, 2000-2010
Media-Government Differences over Ethics
Pakistan offers complex situations of historical clashes between freedom of expression and
censorship, internal instability being the main cause since the 1947-Partition. A succession of
democratic and military governments kept on putting curbs, while media kept on fighting for the
freedom of expression, information, and publication. The governments distrusted media’s lack of
responsibility and ethics and exercised strict controls that formed a clash between the preservation
and regulation of freedom of expression. This clash of objectives of the two incomparable bodies
shaped strict legislations and a control over newsprint at the level of the government for, what it
called, responsible controlling of information that media lacked; it focused on commodity selling
and evidently failed in implementing a code of ethics by forming a Press Council. Incidentally, the
struggle against the formation and implementation of statutory directives for strict censors lead
media professionals into hardships and imprisonments, increasing the distrust between
governments and media.
The government-media differences for self-preservation and regulation rises from a lack of mutual
trust. According to Ziauddin, freedom of expression and statutory directives like censorship and
code of ethics cannot co-exist without “mutual suspicion, bitterness and acrimony” (2000). Such
hostility is evident in the Pakistani case where media “has always functioned under strict control”
regarding the permissible and prohibited. Since the Indo-Pak Partition, every government has tried
to discipline the “ever increasing waywardness” of the Press by making the laws “more draconian”
especially during the (semi)martial law regimes of Ayub and Zia (‘Ziauddin, 2000). The media did
not cope with this situation through self-regulation and became “too preoccupied with selfpreservation”
(Ziauddin, 2000). The resentment of the laws created dichotomy between freedom
and functioning of the Press within the bounds of a self-imposed, universally recognized media
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