A Media Insider on Fake News, TV's Business Model, and Pakistan's Civic Crisis

An Accidental Career in Media

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Asadullah Khan as someone with roughly 180 years of combined experience across Pakistan’s media landscape - a deliberate exaggeration to signal the breadth of what follows. Khan has worked as a film producer, senior producer of current affairs, and director of current affairs at multiple television channels. The conversation begins with a simple question: how did he end up in media at all?

Khan’s answer is disarmingly honest. He did not choose journalism. In the gap between matriculation and college admission in Karachi, his family - like most families of that era - pushed him toward practical skills: typing, shorthand, electrician courses. He was a back-bencher with good English, the product of an English-medium school and a household where Urdu was spoken fluently at home. A friend’s older brother pointed him toward a gap in the market: international media teams were travelling to the Afghan border to film mujahideen operations and needed a local fixer who could speak English, arrange hotel rooms, line up interviews, and navigate the terrain.

“I was just someone who could speak English and knew Pakistan,” Khan explains. He accompanied one of the first such teams to the Chaman border, and from that moment his career in media had begun - not through ambition but through availability.

Learning the Craft Without a Classroom

What followed was years of self-education. Khan describes borrowing production textbooks sent by his brother, a UCLA film graduate based in the United States, and placing them in front of senior colleagues who had never seen the material. He would reverse-engineer equipment the way he had reverse-engineered toys as a child - opening things up to understand how they worked. He taught himself lighting ratios, the difference between tungsten bulbs and tube lights, what a neutral density filter does, and how film-to-video conversion created frame-rate problems when advertisements shot on 24 frames per second were broadcast on television.

A stint at a hotel near Karachi’s international airport gave him something equally valuable: years of watching people. “If you want to study body language,” he says, “there is no better place than an airport.” He observed passengers being received and dropped off, read the grief of departures in the angle of a shoulder or the direction of a gaze, and developed an instinct for reading situations - a skill he later applied to reading newsrooms and editorial politics.

He also travelled through Europe during this period, which recalibrated his sense of what was normal. Returning to Pakistan after seeing how institutions functioned elsewhere made certain domestic dysfunctions impossible to unsee.

How Television Channels Actually Work

Muzamil pushes Khan on the moment private television arrived in Pakistan. Khan dates the opening of the floodgates to General Pervez Musharraf’s decision to liberalise broadcast media in the early 2000s. “A military dictator opened this,” he says, with a note of irony - the same government that restricted political speech created the conditions for a chaotic, competitive media market.

Khan joined one of the early channel launches and quickly understood the structural reality of the industry. His framing is blunt: “Every television channel - whether it is a music channel, a religious channel, an entertainment channel, or a news channel - is not a charitable trust. It is a business.” The content that appears on screen is a product of that business logic. Advertisers, ratings, and ownership interests shape editorial decisions as much as any journalistic principle.

He describes watching senior journalists - names he mentions with genuine respect, including Kamran Khan, Hamid Mir, and others who had migrated from print - navigate the transition from newspapers to television. In print, a journalist could sit alone with a cup of tea, develop a story over days, and hand it to an editor at midnight for the morning edition. On television, the same journalist had to perform: face the camera, fill time, project authority, and do it live. The skills were different, and not everyone made the transition cleanly.

Television as a Medium for the Non-Reading Public

Later in the discussion, Khan makes what is perhaps his most pointed argument. He draws a direct line between Pakistan’s literacy and education levels and the role television plays in public life.

“TV is for people who cannot read,” he says - not as an insult, but as a structural observation. Pakistan ranks 107th globally in education. In a country where a significant portion of the population does not regularly read newspapers, television fills the information gap. But it fills it on its own terms: it is designed for entertainment, it rewards performance over accuracy, and it moves too fast for verification.

He contrasts this with the newspaper era, when a single literate person in a hotel or tea house might read aloud to twenty others - a small but self-selecting audience that had some relationship with the written word. Television expanded the audience enormously while simultaneously lowering the bar for what counted as information.

Muzamil notes that this creates a particular problem: audiences treat television as gospel. Khan agrees. “We take TV and build opinions on top of it,” he says. A claim made on a panel show at 10 p.m. becomes a fact by morning, shared on WhatsApp before anyone has checked the source.

The Verification Problem and the Ethics of Breaking News

Khan describes a specific pattern he observed repeatedly. A journalist or content creator publishes a story - sometimes on YouTube, sometimes on television - that Reuters or another wire service later flags as factually incorrect. The original video has two million views. The correction, if it comes at all, reaches a fraction of that audience.

“The verification standard,” he argues, “requires that before I publish something, I take five minutes to reach out, to confirm, to consider what I do not know.” That standard has collapsed - not because journalists are uniquely dishonest, but because the incentive structure of broadcast and social media rewards speed and outrage over accuracy.

He is careful not to condemn all journalists. He distinguishes between those who are genuinely talented and principled and those who arrived through connections or circumstance. But he argues that the structural problem - the business model, the ratings race, the 24-hour cycle - makes ethical journalism difficult even for people who want to practise it. “It is easier to sell,” he says of sensational content, “and quite difficult to retract.”

He also raises the concept of what he calls the “dumping ground” - a term he attributes to a book on war reporting he read during the Iraq conflict. The idea is that complex geopolitical or policy situations get simplified into a single emotional frame and dumped on the audience without context. Petrol prices go up; the camera goes to a man on a motorcycle. A bomb falls somewhere; the anchor shouts. The systemic cause - fiscal policy, foreign exchange reserves, international agreements - never makes it to air.

Pakistan’s Deeper Civic Numbers

Muzamil draws Khan into a broader discussion of Pakistan’s institutional condition, and Khan responds with a series of rankings that he has clearly spent time with. Pakistan sits at 107th in global education. Its police force ranks 13th most corrupt out of the countries surveyed. Its judiciary ranks 120th out of 128 in a separate global assessment. The Supreme Court alone carries a backlog of 40,000 to 50,000 pending cases; at 500 decisions per day, clearing that backlog would take over a decade.

“Justice delayed is justice denied,” Khan says. In a system where the police are structurally corrupt and the courts are functionally inaccessible, the rational citizen calculates that following the rules offers no protection. The person who breaks a red light is not uneducated - doctors, lawyers, and engineers do it too. “This has nothing to do with education,” Khan argues. “It has to do with civic character - tarbiyat - and we have not built it.”

He tells two parables to illustrate the point. In the first, a king’s enemies poison the city’s water supply, driving the population mad. The king and his vizier, who drank from a separate source, face an impossible choice: rule a population of madmen by their own sane standards, or drink the poisoned water and rule as madmen among madmen. They drink. Khan’s conclusion: Pakistani leadership and media have both drunk from the poisoned well. The second parable - the emperor’s new clothes - makes the complementary point: everyone in the system knows the truth but performs agreement, until a child says what everyone can see.

The Next Generation and What Might Change

By the end of the conversation, Khan turns toward something closer to cautious optimism. He addresses Muzamil directly, noting that the generation now producing content on social media - young Pakistanis who grew up connected to the world - has a quality of exposure that no previous generation possessed.

“Your generation,” he tells Muzamil, “has a very strong and powerful tool in social media, and the knowledge that comes with it.” He argues that the critical thinking visible in podcasts like this one, in young people who question rather than accept, represents a genuine shift. The problem, he says, is that his own generation received that tool and immediately misused it - spreading misinformation, amplifying outrage, rewarding performance over substance.

What he hopes for is that the generation now coming of age will use the same tool differently. He is not expecting government to lead the change. “I am not expecting a government solution,” he says. The change he envisions is cultural and generational - people who understand how media works, who verify before they share, who read beyond the headline, and who hold institutions accountable without becoming instruments of those institutions.

“I think things will be in very good hands,” he says of the future - not as a prediction, but as a conditional: if the current generation chooses to be different from the one before it.