Despite having a rich culture, and proud values, Pakistan keeps on striving to have a soft and positive image worldwide.
“Have we ever reflected on what is going wrong with our image?” Editor-in-Chief of Daily Minute Mirror Ali Sajjad posed the question to the participants of a session on Wednesday by the Eilaf Club. “Several factors might have affected Pakistan’s standing, but our national media could have played a key role in building Pakistan’s soft image among the world community.”
The session was also attended by renowned journalists, scholars and intellectuals, including Altaf Hassan Qureshi, Dr Shafique Jullandhry, Dr Mujahid Mansoori, Ziauddin, MA Siddiqui and others. Ali Sajjad said that Pakistan’s potential remained untapped to compete with other countries in the world. “In today’s fast-moving world, media is one of the key factors which can portray the image of any nation, but in Pakistan, media failed in playing its due role,” he said.
Ali Sajjad explained why he launched the Minute Mirror. “This is just an effort to present the real face of Pakistan,” he said. Besides portraying Pakistan’s image, Sajjad said that Minute Mirror was focused on bringing quality journalism through quality content instead of running in the race of breaking news. “This paper is not just aiming at bringing quality journalism, but also putting efforts for the revival of journalism in the country,” he said and continued that the paper also believed real journalism couldn’t flourish in the absence of committed, trained journalists.
Sharing his idea of establishing the newspaper, Sajjad informed a study in 2016 regarding Pakistan, which highlighted that the media had a major portion in Pakistan’s crisis as it was not playing its due role by minutely observing public concerns minute by minute.
“Only 17 percent of the Pakistani media, mainly English newspapers, could hardly fulfill its responsibility while 83 percent failed in doing so,” he said and added that this made him take steps toward this dire much desired need.
“I believe that the media not just portrays any nation’s soft image, but also can play an important role in bringing social change,” he said.
He added that after the successful launch of the Minute Mirror, he will soon launch a news channel, aiming at producing quality content following the journalistic ethics which will be proven as the voice of Pakistan. “Pakistan has great potential in every field that’s why it is showing progress in the human development index (HDI) but such things are not being highlighted in the media,” he lamented.
Talking about the issues faced by the media industry and journalists, he said that Minute Mirror has all set to enhance its employees’ skills through fellowships and for this purpose, it has signed MoUs with leading international and national institutes.
Speaking on the occasion, Altaf Hassan Qureshi said that Pakistan has given us a lot and we must pay it back. “Pakistan is the greatest gift of Almighty Allah and we cannot payback for this gratitude,” he said.
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