By Sarmad Ali
Islamabad (Pakdestiny) MQM chief Altaf Hussain’s hours-long live speeches on the electronic media now seem to have become history after his tirade against the Pak army.
As PEMRA has served notices on 14 news channels, they have also received direction from the establishment to stop giving live coverage to Altaf. Earlier, the owners of the channels were afraid of MQM and never thought of cutting a ‘single sentence’ of his speech.
Now an interesting situation has been created for some ‘timid’ owners of the channels who find it difficult to say no to Altaf. They have been caught between the devil and deep sea. If they say no to Altaf, he will try to fix them and if they say no to the establishment it will fix them.
Now choice is theirs. The owners of top three channels – Mir Shakilur Rehman (Geo), Sultan Lakhani (Express) and Mian Amer Mahmood (Dunya) – may say “Big No” to Altaf Bhai as they cannot afford ‘panga (tussle)’ with the establishment. The rest of the news channels will follow the suit. Pak Destiny