ISLAMABAD: “I get these reports every morning. They are somewhat painful to read since, as you know, in Pakistan, the media can be particularly outrageous.

“However, we can’t ignore the fact that these talk shows are the most watched programming,” former US undersecretary of state Judith McHale wrote in an e-mail to Hillary Clinton in February 2010.

The reports she refers to are exhaustive summaries of Pakistani primetime talk shows that log the discussion on various local TV shows on a daily basis, reports Dawn.

The media summaries, which regularly arrive in the e-mail inboxes of US Embassy employees or State Department officials in Washington, appear repeatedly in the US presidential candidate’s recently declassified e-mails, most frequently between 2009 and 2012.

The e-mails offer a rare insight into Washington’s engagement with Islamabad through the lens of the local media. In background discussions with Dawn, current and former embassy officials admitted that journalists and media were the primary sources of information for many officials who came to Pakistan.

The summaries of talk shows and news coverage, which contain exhaustive details on what-was-said and who-was-saying-it, would be discussed among Clinton’s aides at the Washington level if there was something of interest to them.

Michael Kugelman from the Woodrow Wilson Center explained that the importance Washington placed on Pakistani media could be gauged from the fact that the embassy in Islamabad actually started issuing official statements meant to “correct the record” when ‘false or misleading’ claims were made in media about the US or its policies.

“It’s an initiative that didn’t last long – and at any rate I’m not sure how effective it was given that many Pakistanis, including those most likely to believe the media assertions that the US was trying to reject, probably were not aware of these US counter-statements,” he said.