RSF declares Muhammad Ziauddin, Hamid Mir, Information heroes
Visit our new website : “100 INFORMATION HEROES”
http://heroes.rsf.org/en/hamid-mir/
http://heroes.rsf.org/en/muhammad-ziauddin/
Muhammad Ziauddin is an elder statesman of Pakistani journalism, with a 45-year career behind him. He served as president of the South Asian Free Media Association from 2002 to 2006 and is now executive editor of The Express Tribune. Since its launch, the English-language newspaper has adopted an unflinchingly liberal tone, whether reporting on religious extremism or gay rights. This has earned it many critics. Last December, the staff were terrified by a grenade attack and brief shootout. In Karachi in January this year, three of them were shot dead in cold blood by a Taliban group unhappy with the paper’s editorial line.
Hamid Mir
Hamid Mir is a star – a star reporter, TV anchor, terrorism expert and security analyst. He has been fired twice, as a young reporter and as the Daily Pakistan’s editor, for articles implicating Pakistani leaders in corruption. He help launched the Daily Ausaf in Islamabad in 1997, interviewed Osama Bin Laden twice (before and after 9/11), and has hosted Capital Talk, a popular political talk show on Geo TV, since 2002. His stellar status has won him many international awards but also police harassment, political hostility (President Musharraf banned from TV for four months in 2007-2008) and repeated accusations of being a Taliban sympathiser. The Taliban dispelled those suspicions by putting a bomb under his car in November after he defended the schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai. Fortunately it was defused before it could go off. Mir was shot several times by four men on motorcycles on the outskirts of Karachi on 19 April 2014.
Source: RSF