Tidbits from the region’s media

News channels in Pakistan really need to get their fact-checking departments in order – and they need to stop the spooks of the country from playing with the citizenry's heads. A while ago, some major TV channels in Pakistan ran a story claiming that the entire match-fixing scandal involving Pakistani cricketers in the UK had been cooked up by – surprise, surprise! – the Indian intelligence agency RAW, and that Mazhar Majeed, at the centre of the brouhaha, was a RAW agent too. They sourced this information to the Daily Mail, the British newspaper. The only problem was that while the Daily Mail has been known to publish outrageous content, it had said nothing about India being involved in the match-fixing scandal in London. So where did this nugget of information come from?

It turns out that some time ago, some geniuses in spooksville in Pakistan decided to set up a bunch of websites, disguise them as 'newspapers', and use them to take 'information warfare' to a whole new level. One of these websites is called the Daily Mail, for which the boys even also stole the logo of the Daily Mail. The 'reports' on RAW's involvement in the match-fixing madness were therefore actually planted by spooks. For their part, the TV channels either decided to play hookey with fact-checking, or were pressured into running the 'story'. Word of advice to the 'intelligence' wallahs: stealing the identity of a known tabloid does nothing for your 'credibility' (and Chhetria Patrakar is using that term very, very loosely here).