Political parties and lawyers gathered outside Geo TV offices in Islamabad on March 16 2007

A year ago, on this very day, members of the Punjab police attacked the Geo Television offices in Islamabad, as the Supreme Judicial Council was hearing the Chief Justice reinstatement case.

What followed has been written about ad infinitum, but it highlighted the question of how free Pakistani media actually was. I was at the Supreme Court when the news spread that our offices had been attacked, and for a second I wondered if we were actually living in the 21st century. To this day, no one has taken responsibility for ordering the attack.

For many years, the Pakistani media, initially the press and later the television networks have been struggling against censorship - whether it is in the form of censoring articles, or taking news channels off air. And despite the condemnation that follows, the Pakistani government - whether it was Zia, or Nawaz Sharif or Musharraf, have made it a policy of sorts to ensure that the media toes the official line, as convoluted as it may be.

Following the Emergency in Pakistan in October 2007, the media once again had to battle a new foe, the PEMRA ordinance, as all private news channels were taken off air.

President Musharraf often says that the media in Pakistan is irresponsible, and that he was the one responsible for giving them freedom in the first place. The absurdity of this statement makes me laugh sometimes - are we, the TV channel representatives, your slaves, that you can grant us freedom one minute, and take it away the next? As far as responsibility in news reporting goes - we will only learn that with time and experience - it is only now, 40 years after the first state channel started transmission, that we have a plethora of private news channels. We still don’t have a single educational program that focuses solely on teaching news reporting in the country. We make mistakes, and we learn, and we strive to do better. But if teaching us a lesson involves smashing equipment in offices and taking channels off air then this government and the future governments need to rethink their strategies. The use of brute force has never resulted in a happy ending.