Naziha Syed Ali: Pakistan’s fearless female reporter

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2020

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Journalist Naziha Syed Ali has made a career out of investigating sometimes scandalous abuses of power in her native Pakistan. Publishing in the country’s main English-language daily newspaper, “Dawn”, she has reported – often undercover – on land confiscation, illegal organ harvesting and sectarian violence. Her work has prompted significant action against wrongdoers, most notably when she exposed malpractice in a major Karachi property development, resulting in a Supreme Court case and payments worth billions of dollars. Being female, she says, can help - if only because Pakistan’s patriarchal society is so sceptical about women’s ability to make an impact, which can lull male subjects into a false sense of security. Nevertheless, her job is arduous and frequently dangerous. In this interview for Assignment with Owen Bennett-Jones, she explains what drives her to work in one of the world’s toughest journalistic beats.

Producer: Michael Gallagher Editor: Bridget Harney

(Image: Naziha Syed Ali gives an interview at a journalism conference in 2017. Credit: Glenn Chong)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello this is Owen Bennett Jones with assignment here on the BBC World Service and today
0:05.3	the final part of our mini series in which four distinctive journalists tell us about the
0:10.4	stories they've reported on and what journalism means to them.
0:15.0	Today we're joined by an investigative reporter from one of the toughest countries in the world in which to work.
0:21.8	Nasir Saeed Ali used to work on magazines she's
0:25.5	dabbled in TV documentaries too but her passion is for a newspaper in her
0:31.1	native Pakistan. It's the main English language daily publication
0:34.8	called Dawn. Now Pakistan does have some press freedoms but only up to a point and
0:41.0	it's actually difficult to report from there because there are no clear
0:45.8	lines about how far journalists can go. So while they can produce some stories holding
0:52.0	powerful people to account,
0:54.0	there is always the risk that it will go wrong.
0:57.1	And journalists are attacked not only legally but also physically,
1:01.7	and sometimes even with fatal consequences.
1:05.1	So Nasir Said Ali, welcome to the program.
1:07.6	Thank you, Owen.
1:08.8	And let's just start with one of the biggest stories you broke in Pakistan because it gives us a good idea of what you do.
1:15.0	You are an investigative journalist and one of your biggest stories in recent years anyway
1:20.2	concerned a building development in and around Karachi.
1:24.0	So just tell us the basics.
1:26.0	What was the development?
1:27.0	What were the developers doing?
	...

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