THE convoy left Adiala after midnight. Within minutes the same clip was on a second account, then a third, each caption firmer than the last. Imran Khan was not visible in any of it. CNN wrote that the convoy was believed to be carrying him. The next day the minister said the examination had happened at PIMS, and that he was back in his cell by five. We had gone live from outside a building he never entered.
The fakes had a head start. On Aug 19, a clip of Khan in a wheelchair circulated as ‘proof’ he had reached hospital. Fact checkers debunked it to September 2022. It came back regardless, because a rumour will always fill the space where a photograph should be. Three years without a verified image is not the absence of news. It is an invitation, and it was accepted. The state built that vacuum. It is worth being precise about who filled it. Consider what this industry has actually done with this individual.
In 2014, we ran a live feed of a container in Islamabad for months. That was not coverage. It was a co-production. A protest needed an audience and a ratings war needed a protagonist, and the arrangement suited everyone in it. We did not report a movement into existence. We broadcast one into existence, and we knew we were doing it. Then we stopped saying his name. After May 2023 he became a category rather than a person on Pakistani television. The PTI founder. Sulaiman’s father. And then a gate opened and we were back, wall to wall, from the wrong hospital.
Three positions in a decade. Amplification, erasure, amplification. What connects them is not a view about the former prime minister. It is the absence of any independent posture at all, an industry that moves when it is moved and calls the result news. There is a cost that lands on us, and it is arriving now.
Why would anyone recognise reporting as an independent act?
A wire reporter shared a story this week in which the PTI’s international spokesperson said, on the record, that Imran Khan would not confront the military or its chief if released. It is a significant statement. The response from supporters was to attack the outlet. Pressed for the substance, they returned to the outlet.
It is easy to file that under fanaticism. I would file it under consequences.
We spent a decade teaching this audience that coverage is allegiance. Every story is framed as ‘for’ or ‘against’. Every panel is booked as a scoreboard. Every channel has dropped a name when it was told to do so and picked it up again when the weather changed. If reporting has never once been demonstrated as an independent act, why would anyone recognise it as one? The reflex was taught. We taught it. It is now a working condition of the job.
None of this means the press built the jail. The state holds the keys and has never pretended otherwise. But the state did not force anyone to go live from outside a hospital that was empty.
So, now what?
It gets harder from here, not easier, and that is the part worth defending. When an individual cannot be seen for three years, everyone who takes an interest in him becomes a publisher. The state issues its account. The party issues its account. Neither can be checked against a photograph, because there isn’t one. The verification burden does not shrink in those conditions.
It multiplies, and it lands on the smallest number of people. This means questions have to be asked in both directions or they are not questions at all.
Almost everything we know about Thursday night came from the information minister, on X, after it had ended. Not one line has been independently confirmed. The PTI’s account has not held still either. His condition has been described as gravely deteriorating for months, and the case that reached the Supreme Court was built on that description. A vlogger even went so far as to hint he was no more, before retracting his suggestion.
On Friday, his sister, who is a doctor, was asked to assess his health and she said he was fit, mashallah, before giving his blood pressure numbers.
A person can be robust and losing his sight at the same time. But that is a question with an actual answer and nobody has been made to give it. Imran Khan joins a long line of Pakistani prime ministers held in poor conditions, and the length of that line is not an accident. It is a reason to ask harder questions. Sympathy has never once produced a verified fact. That is the work. It was the work while we were all standing outside a hospital he was never in.
The case is listed again for Sept 16. There will be no convoy that day.
The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi.
X: @LedeingLady
Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2026
