Five Journalists Received Diversity & Pluralism Awards

Shazia Mehboob

Islamabad: As many as five digital media journalists were awarded the ‘Diversity and Pluralism in Media Awards 2022’ for their best reporting on religious minorities in Pakistan.

The “Diversity and Pluralism in Media Awards 2022” was jointly organized by the Institute of Research, Advocacy and Development (IRADA), the Digital Media Alliance of Pakistan (DigiMAP), and the Women Journalists Association of Pakistan (WJAP) on Friday in Islamabad.

A ceremony was arranged on the occasion of the second anniversary of DigiMAP as well.

The competition involved 100 stories on the issues facing religious minorities across Pakistan, and the best five stories were given awards. The digital media journalists, both in text and video categories (both Urdu and English) were honoured with the awards. Senior Journalist and Founder of Native Media  Kashif Baloch won the Best Journalist category award for reportage of religious minorities.

During the project, IRADA, DigiMap, and WJAP organised a series of workshops for women journalists on “Tackling Marginalisation through Women’s Visibility in Digital Journalism” to bring into the limelight the issues pertaining to marginalised communities, including women, minorities, transgender persons, and others.

“The purpose of the training is to highlight issues of marginalised communities in digital spaces, women from religious minority backgrounds, human rights, and people with disabilities; and how media persons can report on these issues,” stated IRADA Executive Director Aftab Alam.

Through increasing the visibility of women in digital media, the training workshops aimed to combat marginalization, Aftab Alam added.

Additionally, it included an explanation of how religious minorities are excluded or marginalised, focusing on implicit and overt biases as well as intra-sectional difficulties and the constitutional framework for basic human rights.

IMP Adnan Rehmat, while appreciating the role of digital media platforms in highlighting issues of public interest, particularly marginalised communities in Pakistan, stated, “The digital media platforms under the banner of DigiMAP are doing the job that the mainstream media should do.”

Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed, member of Planning Commission of Pakistan, extended the commission’s full support for promoting public interest journalism and said this is the real form of journalism on which the media should focus.

The session’s goal was to demonstrate the critical role that journalism’s coverage of religious minorities’ plays in building a stable, democratic, and diverse Pakistan. DigiMAP President Sabookh Syed informed the participants on the two-year journey of the alliance. The trainers also sparked discussions throughout the workshops about explicit bias, including the exclusion of marginalised communities from the political, economic, social, and cultural systems.