Yet another absurd piece of journalism

While skimming through a number of news papers this morning, I came across yet another piece of absurd and nonsensical journalism. And this time, DAWN was the culprit (Although I find DAWN maintaining relatively better standards in reporting).

The news reported by Mr. Nasir Iqbal appearing in Dawn dated 15^th March 2011 by the title “SC gives loan defaulters chance to file objections” states the following:

“The court has taken up a suo motu notice on media reports that the central bank quietly allowed commercial banks to write off non-performing loans of Rs54 billion under a scheme introduced by former president Pervez Musharraf. The amount swelled to Rs256 billion after the period of written-off loans increased till Dec 2009 (from 1971)”.

The above mentioned lines are ugliest piece of crappy reporting that has numerous flaws and facts twisting.

1. The writer is trying to give a false impression that under some conspiracy scheme, Mr. Musharraf (The president) allowed write off of loans by Commercial Banks (Private Business) through the Central Bank (Regulator). This is clearly fact twisting since the Supreme Court is probing the loan write offs since 1971, but it has nothing to do with Mr. Musharraf or his “scheme”. The writer is clearly giving a false impression that Supreme Court is probably implicating Mr. Musharraf in this case as a mastermind which is certainly NOT the case.

2. Someone should tell this idiot writer that Banking Policy Regulatory Department which deals with the Prudential Regulations for commercial / microfinance banks is headed by the Governor Sate Bank and NOT the President of Pakistan. And there was NO such “special scheme” during 2002 – 2007 that secretly allowed commercial banks to write off loans. Yes there were write offs of the loans in that period and court is perhaps rightly inquiring the matter.

The bottom-line is that the writer here is deliberately misstating the fact and twisting it according to his own bias, giving an impression that Mr. Musharraf was directly involved in facilitating loan write offs. Shame on you Mr. Nasir Iqbal.