Minister for Information and Broadcasting Chaudhry Fawad Hussain said on Thursday that after a long deficit, Pakistan Television was set to earn a profit of Rs1.3 billion this year.
In a tweet, he said the PTV suffered a Rs300 million loss due to the postponement of New Zealand and England cricket teams’ tours to Pakistan.
ایک طویل عرصہ خسارے کے بعداس سال پاکستان ٹیلی ویژن 1.3 ارب روپے منافع کما رہا ہے، نیوزی لینڈ اور انگلینڈ کے دوروں کے التواء کی وجہ سے ہمارا تیس کروڑ کا نقصان ہوا اگلے سال مجھے امید ہے کہ ہم منافع کے تمام ریکارڈ توڑ لیں گے،PTV کی مینجمنٹ اور ورکرز کو اس کارکردگی پر مبارکباد
— Ch Fawad Hussain (@fawadchaudhry) September 30, 2021
He expressed the hope that next year the PTV would break all records of profit. He congratulated the management and workers of PTV on this performance.
PTV in its initial years
The story of PTV started with humble beginnings, with a tent on the back lot of the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation, in 1961, originally as a privately owned television channel, under the stewardship of Syed Wajid Ali, in collaboration with a Japanese enterprise, Nippon Electric Company.
Subsequently, on November 26, 1964, the then President Ayub Khan inaugurated the first official television station, which commenced broadcast from Lahore, followed by Dhaka (1965), Rawalpindi (1965), and Karachi (1966), and was incorporated, on 29 May 1967, as the “Pakistan Television Corporation”, under the Company Act, 1913.
Read more: Fawad Chaudhry denies state made hijab mandatory for PTV anchors
In 1971, as part of the nationalization program, PTV was brought completely under the ownership and management of the government. As a result, through successive policies introduced during this period, the news reporting and cultural ambit of PTV got streamlined as the mouthpiece of the government narrative.
The struggles of PTV
New policies were introduced: women had to wear a headscarf at all times while narrating the news; drama serials were subjected to strict censorship on account of male-female interaction; Mujahideen became the heroes on PTV news; Mullah became the messiahs; modernism was vilified.
As is the case with most journeys into the darkness of conservatism, PTV too found it impossible to climb back into the light of modernity in the post-Zia-ul-Haq period of the 1990s. The government continued to dictate the narrative of the time. Dissent and independent analysis soon became a fable of the past. And the public at large, having no other television alternative, became attuned to the idea of State narrative being the only acceptable news and analysis.
Read more: PTV Becoming Redundant, Losing its Glorious Past
This monopoly of PTV ended in the early 2000s, with the ushering in of the age of private television networks. During the Musharraf years, despite all of its military character, independent media found a new voice. Suddenly, dissent, especially against the government and rulers of the time, became the ‘real’ news.
APP with additional input by GVS News Desk