IT is good to hear that the Pakistan-American relationship is on the mend as a spinoff of the recent visit to Washington D.C. of the ISI chief.

It is good to see that so-called ghairat, or at least the foolish version of ghairat peddled by our hard-right press, did not stand in the way of Gen Shuja Pasha’s visit to see CIA officials to urgently straighten out the kinks that had surfaced in this vital relationship as a result, first of the Raymond Davis case, and then Osama bin Laden’s killing by US Navy SEALs in Abbottabad Cantonment.

Astonishingly, even the Mehran naval airbase attack was twisted out of shape and put on the shoulders of the Americans by the Ghairat Brigades by letting out rumours and innuendo on the Internet by the bright young things, about five or six unidentified Americans being seen in Karachi on the eve of the attack and then disappearing the next day and other such tripe when it was clear, even before Saleem Shahzad’s book came out, that it was an inside job made that much easier because of lax naval security standards.

It is important to recall that these kinks appeared as a direct consequence of the above-mentioned section of the extreme right-wing jingoistic media, print and electronic, running a shrill and raucous campaign which even our great Rommels and Guderians (who at the drop of a tin-hat get rid of elected governments) could not withstand.

Actually, much like News Corp and its News of the World (NoW) and Fox News, this part of our, let me say it again, raucous media actually held the general staff to ransom, just as Murdoch’s now crumbling empire held several British governments to ransom.

For more years than one cares to recall, this wily Australian freebooter and carpetbagger went around the world, throwing his weight about after acquiring ailing newspapers mainly from dissolute owners and setting up monopolies in the print and electronic media.

Barring a few, all of Murdoch’s media outlets were partisan and heavily tilted towards the hard right in politics and in social affairs except in the case of New Labour when they supported Tony Blair and actually helped him to victory.

They too were jingoistic and loud and in-your-face to the point of being downright offensive, cowing down governments and their leaders for fear that they might be exposed for the slightest misdemeanour in the most brutal way.

Indeed, barring Sky News, the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London, Murdoch’s papers and TV stations did not even have basic decency: the News of the World hacking the telephones of anyone who was in the media spotlight at a certain time, even the disappeared and later murdered 13-year old Milly Dowler.

The hacking was not all: NoW actually deleted the parents’ voicemails sent to the child’s cellphone to hear more pleas from them to her to come home, making the parents mistakenly believe that if the voicemails were being deleted (by her) the girl was still alive.

She had been killed many days before her body was found. This was Murdoch’s paper’s worst moment and showed it for the beast it was, with others in the stable joining in to criticise the Guardian which had done such sterling work in exposing the phone-hacking scandal.

Neither was this all. The crooked alliance between NoW and one of the world’s finest police forces, Scotland Yard, has also come to the fore in full force resulting in the resignation of the chief constable of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, as more allegations of his cosiness with NoW came to public knowledge, particularly the fact that the Yard had hired a NoW executive as a media consultant.

This is where the scandal takes a dramatic and unforeseen direction. Britain’s top cop has blamed the prime minister no less, of hiring a more compromised Andy Coulson, former editor of NoW, than the media consultant the Yard hired: Neil Wallis, a former deputy to Coulson.

According to the Guardian, Sir Paul Stephenson ‘effectively pointed the finger at Downing Street, drawing a comparison between Mr Cameron’s hiring of Andy Coulson and his own recruitment of his deputy. According to the Guardian “the point was implicit, but widely understood: ‘I’ll take responsibility: what about you?’”

This whole affair reads like a thriller already and I would not be much surprised if this scandal, for that is what it is, undermines Cameron critically if not mortally. The news at 10 am GMT, Monday July 18, is that the British prime minister is cutting short a trip to Africa on which he embarked barely 24 hours ago, to deal with the serious blowback of this sordid matter.

He has a lot of explaining to do, particularly his reasons for meeting News International executives 26 times in 15 months, the disgraced Rebekah Brooks four times at least. In the words of the Guardian again: “And thus a crisis which, for a long time, was perceived as a relatively contained issue of journalistic ethics, started lapping at the door of the prime minister himself….”

However, the British press is not the only problem that Murdoch faces. His American media empire is in danger too, with revelations that NoW tried to get details of the phone records of 9/11 victims. The attorney general has started an inquiry by the FBI into the matter and most commentators feel that if this is found to be true it could well mean the end of the quite despicable Fox News for one, which churns out hateful right-wing diatribes 24/7.

All of this should give those of our media outlets that are larger than they should be, pause to consider their own conduct and direction. Those in government and in its ‘agencies’ must also balance their media books so to say, and see if towing the line of these raucous outlets (and the agencies’ own mindless propagandists) has actually helped the country in these dangerous times, or damaged it grievously.

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk