Weegee’s photographs are as much about Weegee as they are about crime.
By James Polchin

Media Lens, London, 18 January 2012

News that a fourth scientist in two years, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, had been assassinated in Iran by an unknown agency generated minimal outrage in the press.

Patrick Cockburn notedin the Independent:
‘While the identity of those carrying out the assassinations remains a mystery, it is most likely to be Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad…’

The Sunday Times published a meticulous account of the planning and execution of the attack provided by ‘a source who released details’ on the actions of ‘small groups of Israeli agents’ operating inside Iran. (Marie Colvin and Uzi Mahnaimi, ‘Israel’s secret war,’ Sunday Times, January 15, 2012)

Julian Borger’s article in the Guardian warnedagainst ‘Goading a regime on the brink.’

We wonder if the Guardian would have described the Iranian assassination of scientists on US or Israeli streets as ‘goading’. We also wonder if Borger would have described these as terrorist attacks.

Using the media database Lexis-Nexis we have been able to find just one example of a UK journalist describing Roshan’s assassination as an act of terror – New Statesman’s senior political editor Mehdi Hasan writingin the Guardian. Otherwise, almost all references have been limited to the use of the word by Iranian officials behind scare quotes. (After challenges from Media Lens and other activists, Borger did publisha rare example of non-Iranian use of the term.)

By contrast, in October, the US accused Iran of recruiting a used car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, as part of a terrorist plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in a restaurant in Washington, DC. In that case, journalists had no qualms about using the word terror without inverted commas. Karen McVeigh reported in the Guardian:
‘Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalised US citizen, was arrested last month, and stands accused of running a global terror plot that stretched from Mexico to Tehran.’

The Daily Mail:
‘An extraordinary terrorist plot has been foiled – which would have seen the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. murdered on American soil.’

The Telegraph:
‘Iranian government officials were accused by the Obama administration of plotting a string of deadly terrorist attacks on American soil.’

On Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald postednumerous similar examples from the US media. The alleged Arbabsiar plot was subsequently debunkedby analyst Gareth Porter.

As Greenwald observed, ‘accusing Israel and/or the U.S. of Terrorism remains one of the greatest political taboos’. Responding to a Media Lens reader who had suggested, not unreasonably, that ‘a terrorist is one who brings terror to another person’, Channel 4′s Alex Thomson wrote:
‘Your definition of a terrorist as one bringing terror is nonsensical as it would encompass all military outfits’ including ‘the Royal Fusilliers [sic]’. (Forwarded to Media Lens, February 25, 2005)

Is that really so absurd? After all, following the murderous firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, prime minister Winston Churchill wrote to Bomber Command:
‘It seems to me that the moment has come that the bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.’ (Blitz, Bombing and Total War, Channel 4, January 15, 2005)

Presumably, then, one can argue that the RAF is a terrorist organisation.

Returning to last week’s assassination, while no-one has yet suggested that Iran is now obliged to bomb Washington, Borger argued:
‘If Americans had been killed in the Georgetown restaurant that was supposedly the target [of the debunked Arbabsiar ‘plot’], the Obama administration would have been obliged to respond militarily.’

In similar vein, the aptly-named James Blitz asked in the Financial Times:
‘But even if an immediate military conflict… is averted, this still leaves a wider question: how much longer can Israel and the US wait before they bomb Iran’s nuclear sites?’

The day after Roshan’s killing, Andrew Cummings, formerly an adviser on the Middle East and US affairs in the UK cabinet office national security staff, commented in the Guardian on ‘the risks’ of ‘this audacious approach’ – he meant the murdering of scientists. The sub-heading explained:
‘The death of another Iranian scientist has led to criticism of such actions, but Tehran’s refusal to co-operate leaves little alternative.’

Cummings clarified:
‘What many people fail to recognise, though, is that a covert campaign, while rife with physical, diplomatic and legal risks, is the lesser of many evils.’

And yet, as Patrick Cockburn noted, ‘the US has found no evidence Tehran is trying to make a nuclear bomb, though US politicians [and US-UK journalists] often speak as if this was an established fact…
‘The US National Intelligence Estimates on Iranian nuclear progress, the collective judgement of all the US intelligence organisations, said there was no evidence Iran had been trying to build a bomb since 2003. The Defence Intelligence Agency concluded that Iran’s nuclear weapons programme at that time was directed against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and when he was overthrown by the US, it was ended.’

Compare this with Blitz’s version:
‘Some western intelligence agencies believe Iran will bide its time a little longer and enrich more uranium – but will not take the big strategic decision to race for the bomb in 2012. Still, in every other respect, the auguries are not good.’

Again by contrast, Greg Thielmann, a former US State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst, toldveteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh last year: ‘there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb’.

Readers might respond that Cummings and Blitz are entitled to their baseless views, and the Guardian and FT are perfectly entitled to publish them – that’s what free speech is all about. We agree.

But a problem arises when we try to imagine the Guardian publishing a piece justifying the Iranian killing of a US scientist on a US street one day after he had been murdered. And try imagining the FT hosting an opinion piece that asked: ‘How much longer can Iran wait before launching its bombers against the US and Israel?’

One might think that a corporate media system would act independently of the state – there is no formal mechanism of control. But as the ingrained bias sampled above indicates, this often turns out not to be the case. With regard to human rights, for example, corporate media typically do not simply pick a subject and lavish it with attention. Rather, political power selects an issue, frames the coverage, and media corporations jump on the bandwagon.

Type a household name like ‘Halabja’ into the UK media database search engine Lexis-Nexis, for example, and it produces more than 1,800 references to Saddam Hussein’s 1988 gassing of Kurds. Similarly, the words ‘Srebrenica’ and ‘massacre’ generate nearly 3,000 hits. Both issues have been afforded vast, impassioned coverage.

In truth, for Western commentators, the importance of these horrors is most often rooted, not in the scale of suffering inflicted, but in their utility for justifying the West’s military interventions. Thus an editorial in the Independent observed of Libya:
‘Concern was real enough that a Srebrenica-style massacre could unfold in Benghazi, and the UK Government was right to insist that we would not allow this.’ (Leading article, ‘The mission that crept,’ Independent, July 29, 2011)

A Times editorial commented:
‘Without this early, though sensibly limited, intervention, there would have been a massacre in Benghazi on the scale of Srebrenica.’ (Leading article, ‘Death of a dictator,’ The Times, October 21, 2011)

Of course media concern for human rights could be sincere – journalists are human beings, after all, and human beings often do care about the killing of civilians. But then the record requires some explanation.

Consider the massacre of 53 Libyans at the hands of ‘rebel’ fighters in Sirte last October. The Daily Telegraph reported:
‘Human Rights Watch said 53 people appeared to have been shot dead in a hotel in the centre of the city when it was under the control of fighters from Misurata. The badly decomposed bodies, some with their hands bound behind their backs, were found in a garden of Hotel Mahari.’ (Ben Farmer, ‘Libya will be a “moderate” Muslim nation, country’s interim leader insists,’ Telegraph, October 25, 2011)

According to Lexis-Nexis, the word ‘Mahari’ generates a total of eight articles mentioning the massacre across the entire UK press, with one mention since October. Widening the search to ‘Sirte’ and ‘killing’ produces a few additional mentions.

Or consider the fate of the dark-skinned Tawergha people, former slaves brought to Libya in the 18th and 19th centuries. Until recently, some 31,000 of them lived in a coastal town, also named Tawergha, 250 km east of the capital Tripoli. The UN news agency IRIN reported the ethnic cleansing of the town by Nato-backed forces:
‘Their town sits empty – doors hanging open and homes burned; the sign leading to the city has been changed to New Misrata and its population told not to return.’

As for the people:
‘In an abandoned Turkish company compound on Airport Road in Tripoli, more than 1,500 displaced Tawergha spend their days brushing away flies and watching their children play with toy guns amid piles of rubbish.

‘Here, women and children have huddled around on the uncovered mattresses they sleep on, weeping. They arrived in early November after a physically and emotionally draining journey from Tawergha, having been displaced by armed men every time they settled somewhere new.

‘Every one told of a father, son or brother who is either dead or in jail…

‘[One] young woman told stories of Tawergha detainees receiving electric shocks, having cold water poured on them and being burned with cigarettes by the revolutionaries from Misrata who were holding them. “This is Abu Ghraib, not Libya!… We have done nothing wrong. If they continue to beat us and attack us for no reason, it will become a cycle,” she said.’

A rare, excellent mainstream article by Åsne Seierstad in The Times supplied additional details:
‘”Slaves,” says graffiti on a wall. On a road sign, the town’s name has been scribbled over. “Misrata,” it says now. The commander of the local victors, Ibrahim al-Halbous, had already said it: “Tawergha no longer exists, only Misrata.”’

The article continued:
‘”Brigade for cleansing of black slaves,” proclaims one scribbled message on a wall along the road to Misrata. “Hairdresser. Free haircut,” says another. Large sections of the town are in ruins after the battles.’

Seierstad found that Tawerghans were still not safe even in Tripoli:
‘Seven or eight people live in each room, in corridor after corridor, barrack after barrack.

‘But the construction site has no guards, and the avengers from Misrata can enter even here. They arrive at night. The men sleep fully clothed, ready to flee. Some nights earlier, an armed gang arrived at 2am. “You are all going to die,” they shouted. “Get out, black animals.”’ (Åsne Seierstad, ‘Four months ago, 30,000 people lived in this town. So where did they go?,’ The Times, December 3, 2011)

Last summer, the then Prime Minister of Libya’s National Transitional Council, Mahmoud Jibril, said:
‘When it comes to Tawergha, in my view, this is nobody’s business but the people of Misrata’s. This cannot be dealt with according to theories and textbooks about national reconciliation in South Africa, Ireland or Eastern Europe.’ (Seierstad, ibid.)

Using a different spelling, the Telegraph has so far supplied one sentence: ‘Tawarga has been forcibly emptied of residents by rebels and looted.’ (Richard Spencer; Ruth Sherlock; Rob Crilly, ‘Gaddafi’s son flees to Niger as rebels make more gains,’ Telegraph, September 12, 2011). The sentence doesn’t appear in the online version.

A Guardian article barely hinted at the ethnic cleansing, reporting merely that Tawarga’s ‘mostly black population fled in August when rebel forces captured it’. Chris Stephen described the ethnic cleansers’ attitude towards Tawargans as a ‘gripe’. Seumas Milne mentioned Tawerga in a single sentence.

According to Lexis-Nexis, the Independent has published two articles focusing on the atrocity – a substantial piece in September and a further 102 words in November, totalling 867 words.

Curiously, The Times has published the most significant mentions. In addition to Seierstad’s piece, Andrew Gilligan published a substantial report: ‘The ghost town where rebels took their revenge’ in September. (The Times, September 11, 2011)

A later article reported ‘The expulsion of the entire 30,000 population of Tawarga, a satellite town of Misrata…’ (Libya Tom, ‘Murder and rape campaign brings revenge to ghost town,’ The Times, September 29, 2011)

James Hider also commented briefly in October:
‘The town of Tawarga was accused by neighbouring Misrata of siding with Gaddafi’s forces, and is now all but deserted and largely ruined.’ (James Hider, ‘Where there was unifying hatred, now there is a vacuum,’ The Times, October 22, 2011)

Since Seierstad’s article on December 3, there have been no mentions in any UK newspaper of this clear case of ethnic cleansing by Western-backed forces. As ever, media outrage splutters and falls away when the West is implicated in a crime against humanity. And as ever, this could hardly contrast more starkly with the incandescent ‘Something must be done!’ outrage in response to the crimes of official enemies. Lexis-Nexis finds no mention of any British or American politician commenting on Tawergha’s fate, and finds no mentions in any editorials. Now imagine the coverage if Iran, or Syria, or North Korea had been responsible.

Commentators sometimes lament the fact that the ‘mainstream’ media system is ‘controlled’ by profit-seeking corporations. It is not; it is made up of corporations. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Media companies are key elements of a corporate system that utterly dominates politics. In reality, US-UK military interventions are state-corporate military interventions. It ought to come as no surprise that the corporate media propagandises on behalf of its own interventions and works hard to hide the ugly consequences from a public with the power to resist.

In the digital age, people document and share everything – even insults to the fallen

Jonathan Jones

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 January 2012 18.17 GMT

By Mark Dummett BBC News

On 13 June 1971, an article in the UK’s Sunday Times exposed the brutality of Pakistan’s suppression of the Bangladeshi uprising. It forced the reporter’s family into hiding and changed history.

Abdul Bari had run out of luck. Like thousands of other people in East Bengal, he had made the mistake – the fatal mistake – of running within sight of a Pakistani patrol. He was 24 years old, a slight man surrounded by soldiers. He was trembling because he was about to be shot.

So starts one of the most influential pieces of South Asian journalism of the past half century.

Written by Anthony Mascarenhas, a Pakistani reporter, and printed in the UK’s Sunday Times, it exposed for the first time the scale of the Pakistan army’s brutal campaign to suppress its breakaway eastern province in 1971.

Nobody knows exactly how many people were killed, but certainly a huge number of people lost their lives. Independent researchers think that between 300,000 and 500,000 died. The Bangladesh government puts the figure at three million.

The strategy failed, and Bangladeshis are now celebrating the 40th anniversary of the birth of their country. Meanwhile, the first trial of those accused of committing war crimes has recently begun in Dhaka.

Anthony Mascarenhas

• July 1928: Born in Goa
• 1930s: Educated in Karachi
• June 1971: Exposes war crimes in East Pakistan that alter international opinion
• 1972: Wins international journalism awards
• 1979: Reports that Pakistan has developed nuclear weapons

There is little doubt that Mascarenhas’ reportage played its part in ending the war. It helped turn world opinion against Pakistan and encouraged India to play a decisive role.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi told the then editor of the Sunday Times, Harold Evans, that the article had shocked her so deeply it had set her “on a campaign of personal diplomacy in the European capitals and Moscow to prepare the ground for India’s armed intervention,” he recalled.

Not that this was ever Mascarenhas’ intention. He was, Evans wrote in his memoirs, “just a very good reporter doing an honest job”.

He was also very brave. Pakistan, at the time, was run by the military, and he knew that he would have to get himself and his family out of the country before the story could be published – not an easy task in those days.

When the war in what was then East Pakistan broke out in March 1971, Mascarenhas was a respected journalist in Karachi, the main city in the country’s dominant western wing, on good terms with the country’s ruling elite. He was a member of the city’s small community of Goan Christians, and he and Yvonne had five children.

It was terrifying – I had to leave everything behind”

Yvonne Mascarenhas

The conflict was sparked by elections, which were won by an East Pakistani party, the Awami League, which wanted greater autonomy for the region.

While the political parties and the military argued over the formation of a new government, many Bengalis became convinced that West Pakistan was deliberately blocking their ambitions.

The situation started to become violent. The Awami League launched a campaign of civil disobedience, its supporters attacked many non-Bengali civilians, and the army flew in thousands of reinforcements.

On the evening of 25 March it launched a pre-emptive strike against the Awami League, and other perceived opponents, including members of the intelligentsia and the Hindu community, who at that time made up around 20% of the province’s 75 million people.

In the first of many notorious war crimes, soldiers attacked Dhaka University, lining up and executing students and professors.

Their campaign of terror then moved into the countryside, where they battled local troops who had mutinied.

Initially, the plan seemed to work, and the army decided it would be a good idea to invite some Pakistani reporters to the region to show them how they had successfully dealt with the “freedom fighters”.

Foreign journalists had already been expelled, and Pakistan was also keen to publicise atrocities committed by the other side. Awami League supporters had massacred tens of thousands of civilians whose loyalty they suspected, a war crime that is still denied by many today in Bangladesh.

Eight journalists, including Mascarenhas, were given a 10-day tour of the province. When they returned home, seven of them duly wrote what they were told to.

But one of them refused.

Yvonne Mascarenhas remembers him coming back distraught: “I’d never seen my husband looking in such a state. He was absolutely shocked, stressed, upset and terribly emotional,” she says, speaking from her home in west London.

“He told me that if he couldn’t write the story of what he’d seen he’d never be able to write another word again.”

Clearly it would not be possible to do so in Pakistan. All newspaper articles were checked by the military censor, and Mascarenhas told his wife he was certain he would be shot if he tried.

Pretending he was visiting his sick sister, Mascarenhas then travelled to London, where he headed straight to the Sunday Times and the editor’s office.

Evans remembers him in that meeting as having “the bearing of a military man, square-set and moustached, but appealing, almost soulful eyes and an air of profound melancholy”.

“He’d been shocked by the Bengali outrages in March, but he maintained that what the army was doing was altogether worse and on a grander scale,” Evans wrote.

Mascarenhas told him he had been an eyewitness to a huge, systematic killing spree, and had heard army officers describe the killings as a “final solution”.

Evans promised to run the story, but first Yvonne and the children had to escape Karachi.

They had agreed that the signal for them to start preparing for this was a telegram from Mascarenhas saying that “Ann’s operation was successful”.

Yvonne remembers receiving the message at three the next morning. “I heard the telegram man bang at my window and I woke up my sons and I was, oh my gosh, we have to go to London. It was terrifying. I had to leave everything behind.”

“We could only take one suitcase each. We were crying so much it was like a funeral,” she says.

To avoid suspicion, Mascarenhas had to return to Pakistan before his family could leave. But as Pakistanis were only allowed one foreign flight a year, he then had to sneak out of the country by himself, crossing by land into Afghanistan.

The day after the family was reunited in their new home in London, the Sunday Times published his article, under the headline “Genocide”.

‘Betrayal’

It is such a powerful piece of reporting because Mascarenhas was clearly so well trusted by the Pakistani officers he spent time with.

I have witnessed the brutality of ‘kill and burn missions’ as the army units, after clearing out the rebels, pursued the pogrom in the towns and villages.

I have seen whole villages devastated by ‘punitive action’.

And in the officer’s mess at night I have listened incredulously as otherwise brave and honourable men proudly chewed over the day’s kill.

‘How many did you get?’ The answers are seared in my memory.

His article was – from Pakistan’s point of view – a huge betrayal and he was accused of being an enemy agent. It still denies its forces were behind such atrocities as those described by Mascarenhas, and blames Indian propaganda.

However, he still maintained excellent contacts there, and in 1979 became the first journalist to reveal that Pakistan had developed nuclear weapons.

In Bangladesh, of course, he is remembered more fondly, and his article is still displayed in the country’s Liberation War Museum.

This was one of the most significant articles written on the war”

Mofidul Huq/Liberation War Museum

In Bangladesh, of course, he is remembered more fondly, and his article is still displayed in the country’s Liberation War Museum.

“This was one of the most significant articles written on the war. It came out when our country was cut off, and helped inform the world of what was going on here,” says Mofidul Huq, a trustee of the museum.

His family, meanwhile, settled into life in a new and colder country.

“People were so serious in London and nobody ever talked to us,” Yvonne Mascarenhas remembers. “We were used to happy, smiley faces, it was all a bit of a change for us after Karachi. But we never regretted it.”

How Darwin’s Photos of Human Emotions Changed Visual Culture

What disdain and devotion have to do with the dawn of photography, evolution, and Lewis Carroll.

In 1872, some thirteen years after The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, one of the first scientific texts to use photographic illustrations. Though the work itself was hardly groundbreaking – it was based on the research of French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, who ten years prior used electrodes to explore the human face as a map of inner states and published Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine (The Mechanisms of Human Physiognomy) – Darwin’s book is regarded not only as his main contribution to psychology, but also as a pivotal turning point in the history of book illustration, right up there with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

(More than a century later, psychologist Paul Ekman used Darwin and Duchenne’s research as the basis for his Facial Actions Coding System, or FACS – a codified approach to reading human emotion based on facial micro-expressions – on which I happened to do a decent portion of my undergraduate work and which went on to aid everyone from the CIA to animators. You may also recall the subject from our recent look at the science of smiles.)

Darwin’s contribution to many fields of science, from evolution to geology to botany, are well-known – but it turns out he was also a seminal figure in the history of visual culture. In Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution, photography curator Phillip Prodger tells the remarkable story of Darwin shaped not only the course of science but also forever changed how images are seen and made.

Prodger traces Darwin’s tireless quest to capture human emotion at its most visually expressive – not an easy task in an age when photography was both slow and painfully awkward. After scouring countless galleries, bookstores, and photographic studios, Darwin finally found the eccentric art photographer Oscar Rejlander, a titan of creative history in his own right, and recruited him to capture the emotional expressions Darwin intended to study.

A page of photographs by Oscar Rejlander from the Darwin Archive, 1871-1872. Albumen prints.

Infants: Suffering and Weeping. Heliotype print.

At first, photographs were judged in exactly the same way as prints and drawings. The same standards that applied to them – plausibility, authority, skill, and convincingness – applied equally to photographs. But photographic technology improved rapidly… It took approximately fifty years, but during the latter half of the 1800s photography moved into territory traditional drawing and printmaking could not. Once it became capable of taking pictures faster than what the naked eye could see, it began to affect measures of scientific integrity.” ~ Phillip Prodger

Joy, High Spirits, Love, Tender Feelings, and Devotion. Heliotype print.

Low Spirits, Anxiety, Grief, Dejection, and Despair. Heliotype print..

Indignation and Helplessness. Heliotype print.

But what’s perhaps most interesting is Darwin’s remarkable cross-disciplinary curiosity, a quality I believe is the key to combinatorial creativity. Though he never studied art formally, he had an active interest in art, read art history books, visited art museums, and mingled with the artists on his HMS Beagle voyage. Eventually, the sensibilities of art seeped into his work. Prodger takes a closer look at many of Darwin’s curated friendships – Lewis Carroll, iconic photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, celebrated animal painters Joseph Wolf and Briton Riviere, sculptor Thomas Woolner, and many more.

Disdain, Contempt, and Disgust. Heliotype print.

Hatred and Anger. Heliotype print.

Surprise and Astonishment, Fear and Horror. Heliotype print.

Photographic illustration was an inexact process. Because there were no present rules for using photographs in books, Darwin attempted to create them. Working at a time when printmaking still dominated scientific illustration, he internalized prevailing notions about authority and authenticity in picture making. In this regard, he was a transitional figure, with one foot firmly in the past – lessons learned from the books he knew and admired – and one foot in the future, with the enormous potential he recognized in photography.” ~ Phillip Prodger

Researchers at The Darwin Project, an ambitious initiative to digitize Darwin’s legacy and a fine addition to these 7 important digital humanities projects, are currently crowdsourcing Darwin’s experiment on emotions by asking you to name which core emotion each of Darwin’s images conveyed. The experiment features 11 images and can be completed in under a minute – give it a try.

Rigorously researched and eloquently narrated, Darwin’s Camera is an essential missing link in the evolution of visual culture at the intersection of history, psychology, and art.



Censorship in Pakistan

Economist

Nov 25th 2011, 13:04 by L.M.

AN OFTEN overlooked perk of being a country with a large population and relatively low wages is the capacity to employ people to carry out silly tasks. In India, for example, some people spend their days pasting white stickers onto maps of Kashmir printed in foreign publications (such as The Economist). In neighbouring Pakistan, the regulatory body for telecommunications dreamed up an equally unlikely, if altogether more entertaining, assignment for its staff: to compile a list of “undesired words” that could be used to block offensive text messages. In a remarkable show of efficiency (to say nothing of creativity), the agency managed to find 1,100 words and phrases in English and nearly 600 in Urdu. (Admittedly they may have padded it out a bit—how else to explain the presence of “robber”, “oui” or “k mart” in a list that otherwise places rather more emphasis on sexual adventurism?)

Last week, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority’s (PTA) memo and accompanying list of the words sent to mobile-phone service providers were leaked on the internet. Pakistanis were aghast and amused in equal measure. Previous bans have targeted Facebook, Rolling Stone magazine’s website and the use of encrypted networks. These met with limited opposition. But the directive to block text messages containing certain words was seen as an attack on free speech.

The official reason for the ban was “to control the menace of spam in the society”. Far more likely, the authorities finally grew tired of rude anti-government jokes that circulate widely via text message. Many feature the president, Asif Ali Zardari, in a starring role. (A tame example: “The post office issued new stamps with Zardari’s face on them but they had to be withdrawn because the public found them too confusing: it was impossible to tell which side to spit on.”) Texting is perhaps the most effective means of mass communication in Pakistan: two of every three Pakistanis have a mobile phone and the cost of sending an SMS is among the cheapest in the world. Following public uproar, damning editorials and the threat of legal action from NGOs, the authority sheepishly announced that “implementation of previous PTA instructions have been withheld” after it “received input from customers, government and other quarters on this issue”.

The government’s inability to take a joke isn’t restricted to text messages. In an interview with the state broadcaster on November 21st, the UN’s “world television day”, the information minister, Firdous Ashiq Awan, stressed the need for a code of conduct to help broadcast media through an “evolutionary phase”. There is little doubt that Pakistan’s news channels could do with some restraint, especially when it comes to coverage of terrorist attacks, which tends towards the gory. But critics fear that an enforced code of conduct would use obscenity as an excuse to target the hugely popular political satire programmes that make fun of the nation’s ruling classes. “It’s anti-government stuff, impersonations of Zardari and company—they don’t leave anyone alone. They make all kinds of jokes, some of them quite lewd,” said Murtaza Razvi, a senior editor at Dawn, a leading English-language newspaper.

Pakistan’s broadcasting rules were liberalised under Pervez Musharraf soon after he took power in a military coup in 1999, and the number of television channels quickly grew from a single state broadcaster to nearly a hundred channels. The government would do well to draw a lesson from the experience of Mr Musharraf, who tried to clamp down on press freedom in 2007 and found himself out of office soon after. Mr Zardari may not enjoy being the butt of jokes every night but it certainly beats having angry protesters on the streets of Islamabad.