Questionable Ethics From Pakistan's Premier Media Conglomerate (Updated Below)

Look at the beautiful picture below.


Warms your heart, doesn't it? Puts you in a festive mood? Makes you think of family, and all the good times you've had with them?

Well, you wouldn't be alone. Evidently, Geo News thought all these things too. In fact, they thought them to the extent that they used the picture in their telecasts and slide-shows and whatnot, all during the Eid holidays. And really, you can't blame their taste -- it's an incredible photograph.

Here's the problem, though: it didn't belong to them. They stole it. They took it from one of our readers, Nadir Siddiqui, a photographer who had taken it and put it up on his Flickr page, and didn't credit him or Flickr. They just used it for commercial purposes, one instance of which you can see at 0:11 of this video:



This, in the civilized world, is called stealing. In Geo's world, it's called another day at the office.

I wish I had the time to dig up all the times Pakistani media organizations have treated other people's intellectual property as their own, but I don't. We've talked about this a bunch of times, but perhaps the most relevant example here is when photographer Fayyaz Ahmed's stuff was stolen by the Daily Times completely shamelessly.

Of course, this is not exactly new for the Jang Group/Geo. In my opinion, they have truly jumped the shark in the last year. They have given an op-ed column to A.Q. Khan of all people, who used the space to spout off all sorts of nonsensical opinions on Pakistan and the world. And he was evidently bitten by the plagiarism bug while working there, to the amusement of many (including us).

The News has also given space to nutty conspiracy theorist and irresponsible fool Shireen Mazari, among others. They include on their reporting staff people like Ansar Abbasi and Hamid Mir, people who regularly either make things up, or pass off their own warped opinions in the guise of news behind the cloak of anonymous sources. And this is setting aside the sensationalist and wildly inappropriate news shows and news reports one regularly finds on Geo (though they are hardly alone in this regard).

In short, Jang/Geo steal, lie, exaggerate, and bullshit as a matter of course. If they were a person in real life, you'd hate their guts, and they would have no friends. And yet somehow despite their antics, or perhaps because of their antics, their conglomerate remains the biggest in Pakistan, when you consider the combined readership of The News and Jang, and the viewership of Geo. Their empire is built mostly on the work of their employees -- most of whom are hard-working, I am sure -- but also the work of people like Nadir Siddiqui, who are neither credited nor compensated. The only possible way such blatant cheating will end is if they are named and shamed, but even then, I won't be holding my breath.

UPDATE: On the subject of Geo, anonymous sources and irresponsible "journalism", check out the Water Cooler on Shahid Masood.