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This mixed-method study investigates the state of media and information literacy education in Pakistan by underlining the availability of relevant courses and trained teaching and research faculty at both public and private universities. Using United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) framework, this study explores the perception of faculty members across six key areas of general education and teacher development to improve the quality of media and information literacy in the country. These six key areas include (a) policy and vision, (b) curriculum and assessment, (c) pedagogy, (d) media and information, (e) organization and administration, and (f) teachers' professional development.

The Global South (or Low-Income Countries, LICs) long has been advocating for the establishment of a Loss and Damage (L&D) Fund to address vulnerability and limited adaptation capacity in response to disasters exacerbated by climate injustices, which finally gained international recognition of late. This essay focuses on two key moments that led to this landmark agreement: at COP19, when Philippines climate delegate Naderev "Yeb" Saño advocated for L&D in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan; and during COP27, when global leaders invoked the historic floods in Pakistan as the agreement was reached. We consider how these two disasters were invoked during the passing of L&D in ways that critically interrupted the prevailing spiral of silence to articulate "disasters" to "climate" and "climate" to "justice" in the global climate policy arena. These discourses reveal, then, part of the expanding imaginary emerging to address human agency and inequities in an age of the climate disasters, including the idea of a "global majority." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science journalism in Global South is hindered by several factors, including the absence of local science stories, insufficiently trained science journalists, and a communication gap between communities of scientists and journalists. Drawing on observations from South Asian science journalism and employing the communities of practice framework, this essay proposes ideas for a multi-stakeholder collaboration that aims to bridge the gap between science and journalism in the Global South and to bring science journalism to the mainstream, through a shared goal, partnership, resources, literacy, mentoring and content production. We propose a sustainable institutional interfacing structure — a reciprocal and iterative Coalition for Science Journalism (CSJ) — between science advocacy organizations (SAOs) that produce science knowledge, professional media associations (PMAs) that promote professionalism, and media organizations (MOs) that disseminate information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the induction of information technology and the use of imagerepair focused crisis response strategies on social media by Pakistan Railways amid a recent crisis. A mix-method based content analysis (i.e., qualitative and quantitative) to investigate whether and if so, how Pakistan Railways used Benoit's suggested image restoration strategies on social media to repair its image among customers and in print media. Our results show that Pakistan Railways predominantly used reducing the offensiveness of event (40%), followed by corrective action (34.6%), evasion of responsibility (10.6%), denial (8%) and mortification (6.4%) strategies, respectively. In addition, the use of image-repair focused crisis response strategies significantly varied by social media platform. An analysis of the publics' emotions found in their online comments reveals that, during the course of the organizational crisis communication, negative public emotions gradually subsided into ambivalent ones; and contrary to a highly negative newspaper coverage tone in the beginning of the crisis, the introduction of the Twitter handle has associated with more positive media coverage afterward. Theoretical and practical implications, especially the need for advancing social-mediated crisis response effectiveness in developing countries, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary explores the critical issue of air pollution policies and public engagement in Pakistan, a nation consistently ranked among the world's most polluted. Prolonged exposure to diverse pollution sources leads to severe health consequences, making public education and engagement pivotal for successful environmental policy implementation. By using the National Clean Air Policy (NCAP) as a case, we identified key barriers to public engagement in Pakistan and emphasizes the need for collaborative efforts through an integrated approach among civil society organizations (CSOs), news media, research institutions, and the public. In addition, we introduced the term communities of care to encourage more inclusive, participatory policy making approaches aimed at addressing air pollution crisis in the country. Finally, we argue that the elitist model of policy making, which historically dominated, should give way to a more participatory and inclusive approach to enhance policy implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being among the world's most affected countries by climate change, Pakistan is facing a variety of cases of climate injustice committed by internal and external drivers. Waisbord's referred "Advocate-journalist" model carries a good potential to advocate these injustices to stimulate democratic dialogue among the audience that eventually pushes leadership to make eco-friendly policies. This study critically analyses advocacy journalism coverage of cases of local and regional climate injustice in the editorial contents of mainstream Pakistani newspapers by using the quantitative content analysis method. Results reveal that selected newspapers gave inappropriate coverage to climate injustice issues both in quantity and quality. Besides muddled local and regional climate injustice issues' priorities, editorialists also excessively recommended dirty energy solutions to the policymakers. The final analysis suggests that the findings of climate and energy-related scientific studies were not being reflected in the advocacy journalism contents as well. This failure of "advocate-journalist" model to perform its normative role of potentially advocating the cases of climate injustice with compelling scientific evidence seems to attribute to the political economy of the press or editorial inattention. As a way out of this journalistic lack, Waisbord's endorsed "civic advocacy" groups must intervene to plug the loopholes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]