It happened in the USSR, it’s been happening in Pakistan all year. TV news is fighting for liberty. That’s before Musharraf switched off the private news channels and switched on the emergency lights. We missed them; PTV visuals were deeply unsatisfying — police and cars crawling through the night, while the Supreme Court was in turmoil. You wouldn’t have imagined there was skullduggery behind the camera. Musharraf’s midnight appearance and an interminable speech that tied up his tongue in all sorts of knots, were no sleep-stoppers, either: he lacked everything in eloquence and his emphatic delivery suggested he was trying to convince himself, foremost, of his arguments for the imposition of emergency.

Our news channels picked up the microphone on behalf of their Pakistani counterparts. And the taaza khabar is that they got it right, (by and large). Breaking News was really news and developments, the coverage was unhurried, the tone sober, and the questions pertinent: no, how do you feel about the emergency. Plenty of voices from Pakistan (which only proves that you can stifle the media, but you cannot silence a people), the US and of course India.

If we have to sum up the performances, it would be thus: Musharraf was ruffled, Benazir shrill, Nawaz Sharif collected, Condoleezza Rice critically apologetic and the Indian anchors in command.

Having said that, there is nothing to beat BBC World on such occasions. Sunday night’s one hour with Lyse Doucet from Islamabad should have been essential viewing for everyone in the television business, for everyone aspiring to join the TV business and for viewers who wanted facts with perspectives without the hullabaloo. The special feature answers the question why so many of us so often despair of Indian news channels — this is how we want them to be.

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