The media is supposed to hold itself accountable and would not let any other institution do it. While it takes pride on its watchdog and fourth-pillar-of-democracy role, it must from time to time see where it’s going wrong and if there are some "missing stories" in the content it is trying to cover.

In today’s Special Report, we at The News on Sunday have identified some issues we think are under-reported. On a first glance, one could dismiss a few of these as "already over-reported", like violence against women or education for instance. The truth is they aren’t. Often the dreadful news gets reported while the process that led to that eventuality does not.

Many issues remain untouched because the corporate media is urban-centric and the majority of the population living in rural hinterlands and its problems remain ignored. Agriculture and livelihoods associated with it are a case in point.

Pakistani media is criticised for being over-politicised. In its defence, the media holds that it was this over coverage that kept the political class alive in the long periods of dictatorship in the country. While this may be true to an extent, the over-reliance on statement journalism even in times of democracy has come at the cost of adequate coverage of some key social issues.

The pressure of the advertiser, both private and public, on the media compels a suppression of some news while the demands of ‘national interest’ have kept some key issues from public view, which we think is actually going against the national interest.

Sometimes, lazy journalists have merely used the above as excuses for not doing what they should. At other times, we are guilty of ignoring the positive stories in our midst which simply get lost amid the doom and gloom picture we sell to the reader/viewer.

Over then to the under-reported Pakistan.