Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb rejected the reports alleging that a journalist was fired from the Pakistan Television Corporation after asking hard hitting questions from Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

“Azam Chaudhry is not a PTV employee and has never been a PTV employee. He is and has only been a member of an issues-based analyst pool for PTV. He has not been removed from this pool and has not been asked to leave. Nothing of the sort has been communicated to him. He is part of PTV Lahore Analyst pool as I write this tweet,” Marriyum wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.

Reports were circulating in the media quoting the said journalist, who is also president of the Lahore Press Club, that he had been fired after asking the prime minister questions regarding the curbs on media in Pakistan during a press conference in Lahore.

The info minister said that the views and opinions of Chaudhry were known to the government at the time he was invited to the press conference.

“If the government wanted to suppress his voice or questions, he would not have been invited and given the opportunity to ask his questions. The prime minister answered his questions in detail. I answered his questions as well. The prime minister spent a significant amount of time answering questions from various reporters in the room at Governor House Lahore that day,” she added.

She termed the story of the sacking of the journalist as “unprofessional and falls short of journalistic ethics and standards”, saying that the story was published without taking the government’s point of view.

The minister also criticised the former PTI government for only allowing selected reporters and journalists to its prime minister’s press conferences.