The former additional secretary Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) Afzal Khan has said in an interview to a private TV channel that the 2013 elections were rigged. He said that the then Chief Election Commissioner, Fakhrudin G Ebrahim, was intimidated, after which he deliberately overlooked rigging. Chief Justice (retd) Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry had a hand in manipulating the results while the former Chief Justice of Pakistan Tassaduq Hussain Jillani was complicit too in the malpractice, alleged Afzal Khan. Ninety percent of the rigging, claimed Afzal, was engineered by Justice (retd) Riaz Kayani. It was alleged that the audit of four constituencies demanded by Imran Khan initially, was not accepted and the electoral cases in the Election Tribunals were dragged on unnecessarily. Afzal Khan admitted after all this palaver that he did not have any evidence to support the allegations. ECP member Justice (retd) Riaz Kayani has rejected the allegations as a farce and slanderous. Afzal is throwing tantrums for not getting extension in service, said Kayani. Much of what Afzal Khan has said has been thrown out the window by most of the media houses that had at once pounced on the opportunity of ‘breaking news’. Without proper investigation and verification, the story was taken up as the hottest among the lot that has engaged the public over a fortnight by now on the ongoing protests and sit-in in Islamabad. TV channels are swamped by the views of analysts chosen carefully to toe the policy of the channel in question. Anchors, whose primary job is to keep the discussion factual and objective, have of late assumed the role of agenda setters. The upsetting part of this melodrama is that the protest by Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri is being shown on some channels as a battle between the government and the protesting parties. One of the anchors insisted the panellists discuss the consequences on the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf if it were to back out of its demand to get the prime minister’s resignation. Though some sane voices tried to explain to the anchor that there are no losers and winners in such a situation, he refused to listen and kept repeating the provocative question. Coming back to Afzal Khan, he is on record as saying in the print and electronic media during the course of the 2013 elections that the exercise was the fairest ever in the country’s history because of effective steps taken by the ECP. On April 6, 2013, in a day long workshop on ‘Ethical Journalism in Reporting Elections 2013’ at the National Press Club, Islamabad, he was found saying, “If last elections (2008) were ‘night’, then the people would call the next elections ‘day’.” The question is, when so much was known about Afzal Khan from recent memory, and the rest was later scavenged from his social media profiles, why could the channels and newspapers not restrain themselves from following each other blindly in the pursuit of ratings and breaking news. Now that everyone is beginning to forget Afzal Khan for being a spoiler only, the taste it left in the mouth of a TV viewer is bitter. One is beginning to question if the media houses are performing the fourth estate’s role — that of a watchdog in the public interest — or has it fallen prey to vested interests and bad practices. The trashing Afzal Khan is receiving now from journalists who initially pandered to his claims, reflects as much on Afzal’s integrity as the journalists who could not read between the lines or see beyond their nose. It would be easy to dismiss all this as the result of the unhealthy trends of late in the media. The fact is that just as investigative journalism has died out in Pakistan, principles and ethics have been thrown out ogf journalism in return for material benefits. Justice (retd) Riaz Kayani has decided to sue Afzal Khan and has asked the Chief Justice of Pakistan to take notice of the practice of maligning judges of the Supreme Court. While the courts sort out these grievances, the media in the meantime needs to do some soul-searching. *