For sixteen years, the myth of Abul Harris Chowdhury was standard fare in Dhaka’s print media. In August 2008, one of Bangladesh’s premier English-language daily newspapers published what it billed as a ‘piece of investigative journalism.’
It reported that the fugitive senior political adviser to former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia was residing in a lavish London apartment, enjoying the fruits of ill-gotten gains siphoned through “Hawa Bhaban.”
Fast forward to December 2024. The same newspaper offered a somewhat ‘startling update’ that a DNA test had confirmed that a body interred under the pseudonym Mahmudur Rahman in a madrasah graveyard in Savar, just outside Dhaka, was indeed Harris Chowdhury. He had spent the intervening years hiding on the capital's margins, dying of COVID-19 in 2021.
The two accounts are mutually exclusive. By hiding behind the conveniently elastic qualifier “reportedly,” the newspaper had lent credibility to a smear. It has yet to retract the 2008 piece, which remains accessible online, ready to be cited by unsuspecting talk-show pundits or researchers.
This was a structural feature of Bangladeshi journalism. From the military-backed caretaker regime of 2007 through the long, increasingly tyrannical rule of Sheikh Hasina, which ended abruptly in a mass uprising on August 5, 2024, the fourth estate engaged in a sustained campaign of character assassination against the regime's political opponents.
Whether driven by ideological alignment, commercial survival, or coercion from state security agencies, virtually every major outlet partook.
The media’s sin was not merely passive compliance; it was active collusion. While systematically vilifying the opposition, newsrooms amplified state-sponsored disinformation designed to elevate Sheikh Hasina’s reputation. In the run-up to the dubious 2018 general election, a cluster of fabricated websites ran stories proclaiming that Sheikh Hasina had been named the world’s second-best prime minister.
Major news outlets dutifully published the claim without verification. The cabinet even passed a formal resolution celebrating the phantom accolade.
By September 2023, the rot had deepened. An investigation for Agence France-Presse revealed that in the year preceding the January 2024 general election, Bangladeshi outlets published over 1,200 opinion pieces under fake identities, complete with fictitious academic credentials and AI-generated photographs.
These articles uniformly praised the government’s infrastructure record while brushing aside international alarm over forced disappearances, rigged elections, and US sanctions on the paramilitary Rapid Action Battalion (RAB). Editors either failed at basic fact-checking or were complicit in publishing state-directed propaganda.
When regimes fall, institutions usually face a reckoning. The Bangladesh Police, whose officers fired on unarmed protesters during the July student movement, issued a public apology shortly after Sheikh Hasina fled to India. Yet the newsrooms that provided intellectual cover for those very abuses have maintained a resolute silence.
The sole exception appeared to be Somoy TV, a news channel notorious for its pro-government bias. Its newly appointed chief executive, Zobaier Babu, offered a public apology for the channel’s "anti-public" stance during the uprising. The gesture was praised on social media, but it highlights a deeper problem.
First, Babu was not in charge when the channel operated as a regime mouthpiece; an apology from a replacement carries little institutional weight. Second, his remarks were delivered verbally at an event, rather than through a formal editorial statement backed by the channel’s owners and financiers.
A healthy democracy requires a press that acts as a check on power, not as its public relations department. If Bangladesh’s media outlets wish to regain the public trust they traded away during seventeen years of autocracy, they must do more than quietly pivot to the new political reality.
They owe the public a formal, unreserved accounting of their complicity. Without a genuine reckoning, the Fourth Estate will remain an accomplice to the authoritarianism it helped create.
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Qadaruddin Shishir is the Editor of The Dissent