South Asia Investor Review

Feverish spinning by pro-Opposition media spinmeisters suggests that BBC's Hard Talk host Stephen Sackur has done serious damage to the Pakistani Opposition's narrative about the Army and democracy in the country. By his aggressive questioning of Ishaq Dar, former Finance Minister and  former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's close associate, Sackur has not only dismantled the Opposition parties' narrative but also clearly established that former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is a convicted criminal and a hypocrite.  Opposition Narrative: Ex finance minister Ishaq Dar presented the Opposition narrative focusing on Pakistani "military's interference" in domestic politics, "rigged" 2018 elections and "selected"  Prime Minister Imran Khan. BBC Hard Talk host Stephen Sackur challenged this narrative and questioned the credibility of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Ishaq Dar.  Here are a few snippets of the conversation:  Sackur: It is qui...

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) recently acknowledged the practice of hiring journalists  vetted by MI5 , the UK intelligence agency, to keep out the "subversives". The CIA is believed to have driven American investigative reporter  Gary Webb to suicide  after he exposed the agency's use of drug deals to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua. American researcher Joseph Overton has described a spectrum from "more free" to "less free", known as the Overton Window, with regard to the US government intervention in the media. Here's how American philosopher Noam Chomsky has explained the US establishment's media management strategy:  “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." It seems that " free speech " in the West is really not so free. Courtesy David Icke MI5 Vetting of BBC Staff: The BBC recen...

Pakistan is responsible for almost total blackout of YouTube, the popular video site, around the world. The BBC is reporting that the hour-long global outage was almost certainly connected to Pakistan Telecom and Asian internet service provider PCCW. The BBC News website's technology editor, Darren Waters, says that to block Pakistan's citizens from accessing YouTube it is believed Pakistan Telecom "hijacked" the web server address of the popular video site. In the last couple of days, the Pakistan Telecom Authority was being attacked by the bloggers and others in Pakistan for attempting to block anti-government video content. Some believed it had to with alleged "election rigging" by MQM. In fact, the motivation was to block access to material deemed offensive to Muslims. It is thought that, unlike the filters in China and Saudi Arabia, Pakistani filters lack the ability to stop content selectively and block the entire domains instead. A leading net profes...