The Bleeding Hearts of Our Broken Journalism: Sohail Warraich and the Shrinking Space for Truth
When the journalist must abase himself before power, it is not humility but tyranny that triumphs. In such moments, truth does not fall with a bang but with a whimper—smothered under the self-pity of those entrusted to defend it.
There is a tragicomic pattern in Pakistan: those who cannot hold their ground before power imagine themselves to be kingmakers. The latest case is Sohail Warraich, a journalist who fancied himself mediator between Imran Khan’s PTI and the military establishment. His attempt ended in predictable farce. The mighty did not listen, the aggrieved were not appeased, and Warraich, like so many before him, retreated in silence. What remains is not the memory of a statesmanlike figure but the spectacle of a journalist who mistook his vocation.
Herbert Read observes that Wordsworth, during his youthful involvement with the French Revolution, entered into a liaison with a young woman named Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter. Confronted with the political upheavals and the threat of legal consequences, he withdrew from France. Upon his return to England, his poetic sensibility deepened into a kind of spiritual mysticism, one that critics often liken to the meditative vision of a Sufi poet.
When no one accepted him in the role of mediator, he grew repentant and turned to apology. The transformation was less a reinvention than a retreat—a shift from overreaching ambition to subdued contrition, the classic trajectory of those who mistake proximity to power for possession of it.
It is one thing to interview the powerful, another to hold them accountable, and quite another to presume oneself their equal in brokering settlements. Warraich blurred these boundaries and paid the price. The establishment swatted him aside, PTI mocked his pretensions, and the public saw only another journalist crawling out of his proper role into the perilous theatre of power politics. Warraich is no Frost; when David Frost cornered Nixon, truth itself compelled an apology from a disgraced president. Warraich, by contrast, cornered only himself.
The irony is sharpened by his own linguistic conceit. In his article میری کوئی ذاتی انا نہیں! (، 25 اگست 2025، جنگ), while recounting a televised reminiscence, Warraich proudly declared: “حماد اظہر لارڈ نذیر کے اسٹوڈنٹ Internee تھے جب میں نے لارڈ نذیر احمد کے ساتھ پروگرام ’ایک دن جیو کے ساتھ‘ کیا تھا۔” He meant intern. The difference between intern (a trainee) and internee (a prisoner) escaped him entirely—a slip at once comic and symptomatic. A slip? Perhaps. But slips betray habits. Here was a man who could not distinguish between apprenticeship and captivity, yet presumed himself fit to advise an institution that, in May 2025, humbled India’s might in just four days of war. A journalist incapable of checking a dictionary imagines himself competent to lecture the most battle-hardened establishment in the region. The metaphor, alas, writes itself.
And here Jang and Geo cannot escape culpability. These are not cottage blogs run by amateurs but sprawling media empires with enough educated staff to know the difference between intern and internee. Yet they let it pass. If a newsroom cannot catch such elementary errors, what business has it to lecture the nation on democracy, strategy, or statecraft? If a media house cannot distinguish between the language of learning and the language of captivity, it forfeits its credibility. Better to close the newsroom doors than to masquerade as a university of half-truths.
This is not merely about one man’s blunder. It reveals a media class swollen with self-importance yet hollow at its core. Instead of practicing rigorous journalism—fact-checking, exposing corruption, holding power to account—too many don the robes of peacemakers, judges, and would-be saviors of the republic. They bask in proximity to the mighty, mistake access for influence, and confuse personal survival with professional courage. But when the moment of truth arrives—when the establishment bares its teeth—they whimper, whine, and withdraw.
The Pakistani journalist of this type is not a watchdog but a loudspeaker. Before the people, he roars; before the powerful, he trembles. This schizophrenia has cost the profession dearly. It has eroded public trust, diluted integrity, and reduced once-feared platforms to echo chambers of elite quarrels.
True journalism requires the courage to report the truth as it is, not to embroider fantasies of mediation. Reporters are not judges, not courts, not police. Their vocation is to shine light on dark places, not to negotiate truces in smoke-filled rooms. When journalists attempt both roles, they fail twice—first as mediators, because neither side respects them, and second as reporters, because their credibility evaporates.
Warraich’s failed adventure is therefore instructive. It demonstrates that when journalists abandon the humble yet formidable task of truth-telling, they fall into ridicule. His mistake is not merely personal—it is professional, systemic, and cultural. For decades, Pakistani journalism has oscillated between sycophancy and overreach, between cowardice before power and conceit before the powerless. The result is a profession adrift: easily co-opted, easily discarded, never truly independent.
The way forward is simple, though difficult: a return to first principles. Journalists must report, not mediate. They must confront, not console. They must remember their duty is to the people, not to the powerful. And they must never mistake a press pass for a throne.
Hazlitt once wrote, “the only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy.” Hypocrisy is precisely what our media wallows in when it postures as kingmaker but kneels as courtier.
Postscript: When Journalists Play at Power, They End Up as Pawns
If you lacked the guts to stand by your words, why did you dare assume the role of mediator? Why do journalists in this country insist on acting as peacemakers, judges, and police for politicians—roles they cannot sustain once the establishment fixes its glare? This fiasco should be lesson enough.
The calling of a journalist is not to preside, but to report. Not to posture, but to persist. Be loudspeakers for the truth, not for power. For when you try to be more, you end up as less—whining, weeping, wailing, whimpering before the mighty.
These so-called intellectuals are nothing more than mercenary ventriloquists of power, grotesque marionettes performing the establishment’s will while pretending to scold it. They gorge on the hand that feeds them, sycophantic parasites scuttling for scraps of borrowed credibility to mask their utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy. Their rhetoric, pompous and hollow, is a theater of deceit: Bhutto, cooing at Ayub Khan as if he were a beloved “Daddy”; Nawaz Sharif, crawling in obeisance to Zia-ul-Haq, pledging to carry forward his patron’s authoritarian mission; and now Imran Khan, the tailor-made darling of generals and spooks, fattened on the patronage of Hamid Gul, Bajwa, Zaheer-ul-Islam, and Faiz. They never dare utter the one truth that matters—that sovereignty resides with the people, not with the puppeteers they worship. Instead, like Orwellian phantoms, they manufacture dissent where none exists, promote puppets as prophets, and erase the citizenry from the ledger of power with diabolical cunning. They are not dissenters; they are collaborators. Not democrats; they are grave-diggers of democracy. Ethical dwarfs, moral eunuchs, intellectual scarecrows—each a living monument to servility, a grotesque warning that genius can be prostituted to tyranny. Let them read these words and feel the scorching heat of their shame; may the very seats they occupy ignite beneath them, and may history remember them for the contemptible impostors they truly are.
They masquerade as critics, but in truth, they are the handmaidens of tyranny, erasing the people from power while applauding the very chains that bind them.
