ISLAMABAD: The incarcerated former prime minister and chief of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Imran Khan on Thursday announced a boycott of three private television channels, ramping up his fight against the television networks after they aired interviews – which the party insists were taken at gunpoint – some of his party’s senior leaders who accused him of masterminding May 9 violence.
The directive from the PTI chief comes after his meeting with Sher Afzal Marwat, one of his counsels, during a meeting in Adiala Jail a day ago, followed by a decision of the party’s core committee.
Marwat said, “PTI chief has directed the core committee be informed that no PTI representative will sit on Geo, Samaa and Channel 24 television”.
Following directives from Khan, the core committee also announced to boycott the three anchors namely, Kamran Shahid (Express News), Adil Shahzeb (Dawn News), and Muneeb Farooq (Samaa TV) for what it said, “working as facilitators to the state kidnappers in their unconstitutional and unlawful acts by conducting planted interviews of three forcibly disappeared leaders of PTI in total defiance of journalistic values and ethics”.
The PTI spokesman, Raoof Hasan, said that the core committee approved the boycott of the trio who “facilitated the state kidnappers by conducting planted interviews of the enforced disappeared PTI leaders, Usman Dar, Sadaqat Abbasi, and Awami Muslim League chief Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, who were later suddenly reappeared only after recording their interviews”.
He said that no representative of PTI would participate in the programmes of the above-mentioned anchors who badly dented the sanctity of the noble journalistic profession in discharge of their duties.
He showed optimism that the media management and its affiliated journalists would abide by the constitution and law and the established journalistic values and ethics.
He maintained that the so-called three anchors conducted “planted interviews in collaboration with the abductors of the forcibly disappeared leaders Usman Dar, Sadaqat Abbasi and Sheikh Rashid”.
He underscored that the planted interview of the unconstitutionally and illegally disappeared citizens and politicians with the facilitation of the state kidnappers was an attack on journalistic values and ethics and a criminal act.
He made it clear that PTI would neither participate in any discussion or programme with these three anchors as a protest nor cooperate with them in any way.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023