![]() Sultan Ali Lakhani worked as the group’s chairman till 1988 and is serving as its advisor presently. Over time, this business would expand and become Lakson Group which is now one of the largest commercial and industrial conglomerates in Pakistan. His family subsequently moved to Karachi where his father Hassanali Karabhai set up a business in 1954. This censorship is done under the direct supervision of Sultan Ali Lakhani who is known to micro-manage editorial contents particularly in order to ensure that he does not fall on the wrong side of the powers that be and the religious establishment.īorn in 1948 in Gondia, a town in what is now India’s Maharashtra state. Sometimes these two factors result in the contents of the television channel, as well as those of its sister outlets, dailies Express and Express Tribune, being heavily censored within their newsrooms. ![]() It has a conservative political and social stance and a supportive ethos towards the security and intelligence agencies. Express News took full advantage of this situation and expanded its audience rapidly on the back of its coverage of news as and where it happened.Įxpress News has a middle of the road market-friendly editorial policy and never hesitates from mixing entertainment with current affairs. As a result of that clash, Geo News was briefly shut down and its major talk shows were banned from being aired. In another similarity with daily Express, the launch of Express News, too, coincided with a confrontation between Jang Group / Geo Television Network and the government of the day – in this case headed by president Pervez Musharraf. ![]() Over the years, though, other television channels have also made investments to ensure live coverage of local / regional news and the initial edge that Express News attained in this regard has been lost. Resultantly, for a brief period of time after its launch, it was the second most viewed news channel in Pakistan – not far behind Geo News, the market leader. This was also a replica of Express Media Group’s earlier strategy of having multiple regional / local editions for daily Express, giving local readers more local news than newspapers based in far off big cities could manage.Īs has been the case with daily Express, the two strategies worked, at least initially, and Express News soon became a favorite channel for all those viewers who were more interested in local / regional news than the national one. The second major decision that the news channel took was to have a large fleet of DSNG vans – largest for any news channel at the time of its launch – for live coverage of news from almost all the regions of Pakistan. This move was premised on the assumption that the news media audience in Punjab province, of which Lahore is capital, had outgrown than that in Karachi. Express News – just like daily Express, the Urdu-language newspaper of Express Media Group – set up its headquarters in Lahore, not in Karachi where most other news televisions are based. ![]()
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