Before yammering usual denials, at least have the decency of being objective and seeking facts about who published the report - in whatever form - in the first place. Thankfully, after reviewing the whole thing yesterday, Cafe Pyala did the job for us. And FFS stop usual Indian-media-haye-haye. Guilt follows both sides of the border in this case - and the chums here are not any bit less guilty.
The Curious Case of the 'Concocted' Confession
Imagine my surprise when Monday night I saw a news item on Geo which began with the anchors heaping scorn on the Indian media for following in the footsteps of the English media in trying to 'unfairly attack' Pakistani cricketers. According to Geo, Indian media had "fabricated" a new story about Pakistan cricket and was now claiming that Mohammad Amir, Pakistan's teenage fast-bowling sensation implicated in the recent spot-fixing scandal and subsequently suspended by the International Cricket Council (ICC) pending investigations, had accepted his involvement in the scandal and blamed former captain Salman Butt (also suspended) for leading him astray. The Geo report questioned the credibility of the "Indian media" report that Amir might, in fact, turn approver against Butt by showing footage of Amir moving around with Butt after his return to Pakistan and commented that the footage of their chumminess contradicted the claims by the Indian media.
Here's the story as it appeared in the evening's 9 o' clock news. Watch from 05:42.
YouTube - geo news 27 september 2010 part 3
So why was I surprised? Because I had read the news item the Geo report was snarkily referring to and condemning, and it was no Indian media where I had read it. In fact,
it was an exclusive report that very morning in Geo's sister Jang Group concern, The News. This is what The News' credible sports reporter Khalid Hussain had published that morning:
Why on earth would Geo pretend it was an Indian media report? And why would they attack and undercut their own group's newspaper report? Was this some bizarre decision to spin a damaging report (and if so, on whose prompting)? Or did it mean that nobody at Geo bothers to read even their own group's newspapers?
The sarcastic report continued to be broadcast all evening and soon other channels - such as Express - also picked up the thread and joined in. The next morning, Geo Super in its own sports headlines too began to attack Indian media for its biases and
even showed the offending report in the Times of India (TOI, incidentally, the Jang Group's partner in the floundering Amn Ki Asha project).
The TOI report is actually a Press Trust of India (PTI) wire agency report. And then the penny dropped for me (only partially though, as you will see later). Illiterate oafs that Geo sports editors are, I surmised, they had obviously either not read Khalid Hussain's exclusive or failed to connect the fact that the PTI report was probably simply picking up the report in The News.
But there was a problem: even though the PTI report was obviously written more than 12 hours after Hussain's report was published, there were some discrepancies between the two reports. For one, the PTI report never cited The News' report as its source and, in fact, claimed slightly different 'facts' regarding Amir's alleged confession. In particular, the PTI report claimed Amir had confessed to Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Chairman Ijaz Butt rather than one-day team captain Shahid Afridi and manager Yawar Saeed, as Hussain had written.
Here is the original PTI wire report with all its header info intact (which a source has kindly provided us):
First of all, note that the report was filed in the evening of September 27th (at 1847 hours, as evidenced from the filing time at the bottom), whereas Hussain's story was obviously written on September 26th for it to be published on the morning of September 27th. Mighty strange that a supposed exclusive appears on the wires many hours after an exclusive on the same exact subject appears in the national papers. Generally, wire agencies will not carry such a story as an exclusive if the news has already been broken earlier.
Secondly, note that whereas Khalid Hussain's piece cites specifics of Amir's confession, the PTI story does not and only cites "PCB sources", one of whom (the legal counsel) actually completely contradicts the assertions. As it is, the only possible sources of Hussain's story, as is obvious from the specifics of the report itself, could be only either Amir, Shahid Afridi or Yawar Saeed, which give it far more credibility. Our sources confirm that Hussain's source was, in fact, Afridi himself. The PTI story, on the other hand, seems to have been an unethical plagiarism of Hussain's story, further embellished and distorted to seem like an original piece of reporting.
But it gets far more interesting. Please note that the dateline on the PTI story is Karachi. That is to say, this report was not "concocted" in India, but rather written / "concocted" by PTI's correspondent in Karachi. So a Pakistani journalist actually wrote the PTI story but yet Geo attacked the Indian media for making up stories about Pakistan cricket. That's not the end of the bizarreness. According to our extremely well-informed sources, guess who moonlights as the PTI's sports correspondent in Karachi? The venerable sports reporter Waheed Khan, that's who.
Waheed Khan was not only Karachi sports editor Khalid Hussain's predecessor at The News but is also currently a senior staffer at Geo Super and apparently responsible for the content of Geo Super's bulletins. (Incidentally, Khan also covers sports for Reuters but the story never ran on that wire agency.) He is one of the 'big guns' of sports journalism in Pakistan and has done some stellar reporting work in the past, especially during the match-fixing saga of the 1990s. It seems, however, that this time his professional jealousy at Hussain's exclusive seems to have got the better of him. According to sources, he and Hussain are not on the best of terms either, mainly because Khan has been attempting to get a foothold again at The News as well, which would impact Hussain's position.
So, in effect, a Jang Group staffer first (surreptitiously) put out an "exclusive" that, in all probability, was simply an embellishment on another Jang Group staffer's real exclusive (even if it was not, it wasn't an exclusive by any stretch of the imagination since it had been beaten to the finish line by many hours). And when that faux exclusive was picked up in the most roundabout way by his own Jang Group organization (which obviously does not bother to read Jang Group newspapers), he helped or at least supervised its on-air demolition on Jang Group channels as an example of a fabricated story by Indian sources.
If that doesn't make your head spin, I don't know what will.
Cafe Pyala: The Curious Case of the 'Concocted' Confession
