One evening last June, during an oppressively hot summer in Islamabad, I attended a protest organized by Pakistani television journalists. A fiery stream lit Constitution Avenue—the broad thoroughfare is lined with the state’s most powerful political institutions—as a torch-carrying procession marched past the Supreme Court. The marchers chanted slogans against the military regime of Pervez Musharraf, vowing “endless war, till the media are freed.”

Some of the biggest names in Pakistani television were among the protestors, names known to nearly a third of the urban population in this country of 150 million. “Imagine if one of us showed up on air with a bruise tomorrow,” an anchor I recognized from a popular political talk show said, stopping next to me. He smiled smugly, and stepped over a listless tangle of barbed wire that had been flattened by the crowd. Islamabad police in full riot gear lined both sides of the road, watching silently.

The protest that evening—there were several by journalists last summer—began with rousing speeches outside the offices of Pakistan’s most popular private television network, GEO-TV. Journalists, mainly from broadcast media, and hundreds of their supporters were demonstrating against the sweeping restrictions introduced by Musharraf’s government a few days earlier on all electronic media—basically FM radio and, particularly, the more than sixty private satellite television operations that have emerged in the last seven years as a popular but controversial alternative to state-run TV. The new laws restricted live coverage and gave unprecedented power to government regulators to seize private property and interrupt broadcasts deemed unacceptable.

The crackdown had been long coming. Three months earlier, in March, GEO-TV’s offices were the scene of a defining moment for the journalists in Pakistan’s independent television news business—when their struggle against government restrictions itself became news, and helped them glimpse their...

Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.