Claim: A Dawn report quotes Imran Khan as saying “hope lies with the establishment in ending this farce” in a live address on 15 March 2022.
Fact: Khan actually said, “I would like to say it to the judiciary, before anything else, that the only hope we have left is in the judiciary.” He then added, “So we are only hopeful of the judiciary and, secondly, we ask the establishment whether they are interested in the security of Pakistan and, if they are, then they must stop this farce.”
On 15 March 2023, Imran Khan addressed the nation live in response to the police’s attack on activists and protesters of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) who had gathered around Zaman Park, Lahore, in a bid to prevent his arrest by the Punjab police.
The Pakistani media outlet, Dawn, covered Khan’s live address and published a report with the headline, “With LEAs at the gates, Imran says ‘hope lies with establishment’ in ending this ‘farce’”.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check found the headline to be misleading. The article links to the complete address published on PTI’s official Youtube channel.
In the video, it is evident that Khan is not appealing to the establishment to put an end to the “farce” and alleviate the political unrest in Lahore. Instead, he refers to the judiciary as his “only hope”, urging it to take notice.
Khan said, “I would like to say it to the judiciary, before anything else, that the only hope we have left is in the judiciary” and later adds that “so we are only hopeful of the judiciary, and secondly we ask the establishment whether they are interested in the security of Pakistan, and if they are, then they must stop this farce.”
Within an hour of the article’s publication, Dawn modified the headline to “PTI claims Zaman Park ‘under extreme attack’ by law enforcement personnel”, however, the subheadline remained misleading, stating, “Imran says “hope lies with the courts and establishment” in ending this “farce”. Moreover, the publication did not issue a correction after editing the misleading headline.
Virality
While Dawn edited the headline of their article, the post on their official Facebook page has not been edited, and carries the same misleading headline. Dawn News is the largest English-language newspaper in the country, with 2,517,725 people following Dawn.com on Facebook. The post received 382 reactions and comments on Facebook and was shared 16 times, after being online for two hours.
Other posts on Facebook sharing the same misleading headline can be seen here, here and here.
Daily Star, a Bangladesh-based news organisation, reshared the Dawn article with the same headline on their website as well. Their Facebook post can be found here.
Conclusion: Imran Khan did not say “hope lies with the establishment”.