Busting Pakistan's "Monopoly On Truth"

Mir Shakil-Ur-Rahman is no stranger to the news business. When he was a child, he spent every lunch break from school at his father's newspaper office, learning the ropes. He was lucky. Dad had founded and built up a major print media group. When Rahman took over, he extended the group's reach into electronic media. Now, at 47, he's one of Pakistan's biggest media magnates as founder of GEO TV, the country's most-watched satellite news channel.

More important, Rahman has revolutionized the way ordinary Pakistanis perceive the world around them. For more than four decades, the nation's 152 million citizens had access only to state-owned TV, whose "news" offerings were pure propaganda for the government. In the 1980s and '90s, as Karachi erupted in ethnic violence, people would hear bombs exploding around them, but TV news would fail to report what was going on.