Information Secretary of PTI.
The report measures election coverage in multiple categories, including: a) rallies and press conferences; b) time allocated to political actors during Prime Time programming; c) direct speech/quotes within news; and d) political advertising.
The EU’s report shows that in rallies and press conferences category, the PTI got the highest coverage from Geo News, which is almost twice as much as the second channel in this category — Express. (Approximations from graph shows: Geo 6,250, Express 3,500, ARY 3,000, Dawn News 2,750 ).
In time allocated to political actors in Prime Time programming category, again the Geo News gave the PTI the highest share compared to all other satellite news channels (Geo 21%, ARY 18%, Express 17%, Dawn News 16%).
In the category of time allocated to political actors in news, the Geo News gave the PTI the highest share, doubling almost the figure of the second highest. (Geo 32%, ARY 17%, Express 16%, Dawn News 16%)
In the category regarded direct speech within news, the news channel which gave the highest share of its coverage to the PTI was Geo News with 25%.
However, in the last category measured by the EU — time allocated to political advertising, the PTI gave more advertising air time to Dawn News, ARY, and Express than Geo News. Though this could be because of Geo’s rates are higher as its viewership is also higher.
According to third party ratings agencies, Geo News has three times the net viewership of the second most watched news channel of Pakistan for which there has historically been a tie between three channels. If one takes into account the net ratings and net viewership impact, it is safe to say that the PTI got most of its message out during the elections courtesy Geo News.
However, Shireen Mazari, Information Secretary of the PTI, for some particular reason, is convinced that Geo was involved in rigging the elections 2013 against Imran Khan.
Imran Khan on May 20 tweeted a graph, rallies and press conferences category (mentioned above), which was from the same EU report. Imran alleged that Geo gave more coverage to the PML-N than the PTI and referred to Geo’s bias. However, the very same graph shows that the PTI itself got more coverage from Geo than any other channel.
Also regarding the PML-N, it can also be seen from the same graph that every channel gave more coverage to the PML-N in that category, including Dawn, ARY, Express and others. The reason for this could be multiple, including the organisational skills of the party at the time, quality and number of candidates, experience and how it was polling in survey after survey at the time. Khan did not, however, tweet the other graphs mentioned above in the EU report.
The EU Elections Observation monitored the media outlets from 8th April to 9th May from 18:00 to 24:00 daily.
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