LAHORE: President Asif Ali Zardari has summoned a meeting of the central executive committee of Pakistan People’s Party on November 9 to discuss ways of ‘handling’ the media, particularly a group which many in the party believe is following ‘an agenda to topple the government’.

The CEC members have been asked to come up with suggestions.

However, President’s media adviser Farahnaz Ispahani told Dawn that the CEC meeting had a ‘routine agenda’.

According to a source in the PPP, the party has already received suggestions from some senior leaders who believe that curbs on the entire media could backfire. They have suggested a boycott of the group which is leading a media campaign against the government.

‘By doing so we will not only register our protest but also force the group to end its hostility towards the government, especially President Zardari,’ he said.

‘The way it (the media group) tried to create a crisis by twisting the statement of MQM chief Altaf Hussain about his advice to President Zardari has annoyed everyone in the PPP, including Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani,’ he said.

This forced the president to call the CEC, he added.

A senior PPP leader, who attended a meeting at the presidency on Monday, claimed that the MQM was going ‘nowhere’. All its 25 MNAs attended the meeting, he said.

The CEC meeting is being held in the wake of a decision by the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Information and Broadcasting that laws enforced by the Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf’s regime to bridle the electronic media should be incorporated into the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority Act, 2008.

It is said that the information ministry is under tremendous pressure to stop the electronic media from ‘showing programmes which create confusion and uncertainty’.

Under the proposed amendments, no TV channel will be allowed to broadcast footage of a suicide bomber, a terrorist, bodies of victims of terrorism and statements of extremists, militants and terrorists.

No anchorperson or host will propagate anything in a manner prejudicial to the ideology of Pakistan or sovereignty or security of the state. Besides, no channel will broadcast any programme inciting violence or hatred or any action prejudicial to maintenance of law and order, ridiculing the head of the state, armed forces or executive or legislative or judicial organs of the state.