The Punjab Tussle.

The Punjab Assembly has been no stranger to chaos in the past few months, but the late hours of Wednesday night and Thursday morning saw yet another late vote. This time it was on the trust motion for Chief Minister Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi. The CM and the PTI coalition won a resounding victory by getting the exact number of votes they had predicted-186+1 if you include the deputy speaker as well. Yesterday, the PTI coalition used this victory to quickly follow through on its promise of dissolving Punjab Assembly with the CM sending a signed summary for the governor to act upon. However, if the various news channels and their opinions were to be considered, one could see that the numbers and analysis of the expected outcome of the trust motion were only based on opinion and not actual facts. Reporting the news is about providing facts to the public, not opinion or wishes for one side to trump the other. This is something that all channels must ponder upon going forward. The polarisation that has become the norm in politics cannot be extended to the realm of journalism. But on matters related to the assembly, the trust motion provided the PTI coalition with the impetus to decide a course of action on its own terms, while the PML-N alliance in Punjab has suffered a substantial loss. With...