From Kathmandu

Waqar Gillani

A group of almost two dozen Pakistani journalists from mainstream print and electronic media have gathered at Radisson, Kathmandu, for a week to avail the opportunity of getting trained to further improve the reporting on human rights, minorities, and starting using digital media.

Senior Journalists - all women - from International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ), Search for Common Ground, and United Nations Alliance of Civilizations have jointly been training the gender-proportioned participants of the workshop.
The trainers, all senior journalists from Unites States, United Kingdom and Canada, have been focusing interaction with the Islamic media journalists in Pakistan to have an understanding of the nature of the job the religious publications religiously do.

The interaction with the religious publications’ editors – mostly clerics and separately invited to attend the workshop – was unique. It gave sense of understanding how do the religious media presents its views on national and international issues. The trainers also stressed upon the participants to improve their contact lists of better reporting.

The second day was quite interesting because of the extended help from trainers with suitable resource material to add details to the human rights stories. Can a reporter listen to a barking dog (smell news) and find the clues from the shadowy story to make it a solid and credible public report was one of the main questions of the day. The debate on “conflict” was also interesting especially when it took up the recently passed legislation by Switzerland parliament to ban the minaret of mosques in the country.

The terminology used by Western and American media like “Islamic terrorism”, “Islamists”, “Jihad” also created a heated debate among the Pakistani media participants. It created a positive conflict amongst the participants with majority denouncing the use of these terms as ‘conspiracy’ against Islam and Pakistan. The voice, asking to evaluate these terms on the basis of a fair and rational approach with the contextual meaning of these normally but enormously used terms while covering the war on terror, seemed in minority.