Outlet profile

Daily Times

Pakistani, liberal/secular-leaning English-language daily

Owned byPrivately held by the family of its founder, the late Salmaan Taseer. Shehryar Taseer is listed as owner and CEO, and the publisher is Media Times Limited.

FundingMainly advertising and sales revenue, backed by the owning family's private money. It has no known state or party subsidy. It has had serious financial trouble, including unpaid staff salaries.

On the administrationmostly neutral

Background

Daily Times was launched on 9 April 2002 by Salmaan Taseer, a businessman who later became a Pakistan Peoples Party politician and Governor of Punjab. Najam Sethi, a veteran journalist, was its first editor-in-chief and stayed until about 2009. Wikipedia and other reference sources describe the paper as left-leaning, promoting liberal and secular ideas, and it has often been a platform for criticism of religious extremism and the military's political role. After Salmaan Taseer was assassinated in 2011 over his opposition to the blasphemy law, ownership passed to his family, and his son Shehryar Taseer became the owner/CEO. In 2018 Pakistan's Supreme Court ordered Shehryar Taseer placed on the no-fly list over long-unpaid staff salaries, a sign of the paper's financial strain. Its ties to the Taseer family and to the Pakistan Peoples Party milieu are a relevant context for its domestic political coverage. On U.S. politics, my searches found no documented editorial record on the second Trump administration, so any such view should be treated as unestablished rather than assumed. This profile rests largely on Wikipedia and a few secondary sources, and I could not retrieve the paper's own recent coverage.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-10-05; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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