Manufacturing Truth
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In an interview at the Cannes Film Festival, Sharon Stone, suggested that the devastating earthquake that hit China was the Karma, the punishment for China’s alleged atrocities against Tibet and yesterday, Christian Dior announced that they were dropping her from all the Chinese advertising. Ms. Stone, it is reported that, apologized profusely and volunteered to for the earthquake relief work.
We have heard such blasé comments form celebrities quite often in the past but not on humanitarian crises and we I shall not discuss the merits of celebrity comments. What interests me is how the western media, coerced as usual by their respective government, has been treating the cause of the Tibetan struggle for autonomy. We have been hearing of the Tibetan fighters have been trampled by the Chinese army et al. A leading Indian news magazine put it as a Pavlovian media and political campaign lead by the western block, “by fanning the flames of violence in Tibet”. Several, countries have threatened to boycott the Beijing Olympics, sighting the excess of the Chinese army, and to prove their point, several pictures of the authorities beating up protesters have been flashed across the global media and some of the media names may be familiar to for their antecedence of “Fair” (?) news coverage which include CNN, Fox News, BBC and a host of other international media agencies.
According to Forntline, following the allegation made by the Dalai Lama about the excess of the Chinese Army, a sensational photograph started doing the rounds in the internet. The photograph showed several army men in uniforms holding folded Robes. The Dalai Lama’s office said that it was the army men in these robes had rioted in Lhasa on March 14, 2008. Some of the netizens, mostly Chinese, researched on this photograph, which shook the world and found that the summer uniforms worn by the policemen in the picture was something out of the question for March 14 in the Lhasa cold. Another fact which questioned the credibility of the photo was the the absence of shoulder badges, worn by all PAP servicemen since 2005. Further online discovery gave the lie to what the photograph was supposed to be: it had been originally uploaded on a website linked to the Dalai Lama’s ‘government-in-exile,’ with the caption reading: “This photo was apparently taken when monks refused to act in a movie, so soldiers were ordered to put on the robes”. [Source: Frontline]
What the article did was, blast the claims, of western media and the neo-journalism rampantly available in India, of “fair and truthful” reporting. Often these media uses the excuse of “lack of onsite access” to guise their partisan coverage of issues which are mostly provided by the parties for whom they are reporting or just plain hearsay based on the editorial bias. I have lost the count of misinformation, provided on the basis of hypothesis and just mere conjecture, by the Indian media.
Credits: Parts of the article published in The Frontline have been used in this post.
In an interview at the Cannes Film Festival, Sharon Stone, suggested that the devastating earthquake that hit China was the Karma, the punishment for China’s alleged atrocities against Tibet and yesterday, Christian Dior announced that they were dropping her from all the Chinese advertising. Ms. Stone, it is reported that, apologized profusely and volunteered to for the earthquake relief work.
We have heard such blasé comments form celebrities quite often in the past but not on humanitarian crises and we I shall not discuss the merits of celebrity comments. What interests me is how the western media, coerced as usual by their respective government, has been treating the cause of the Tibetan struggle for autonomy. We have been hearing of the Tibetan fighters have been trampled by the Chinese army et al. A leading Indian news magazine put it as a Pavlovian media and political campaign lead by the western block, “by fanning the flames of violence in Tibet”. Several, countries have threatened to boycott the Beijing Olympics, sighting the excess of the Chinese army, and to prove their point, several pictures of the authorities beating up protesters have been flashed across the global media and some of the media names may be familiar to for their antecedence of “Fair” (?) news coverage which include CNN, Fox News, BBC and a host of other international media agencies.
According to Forntline, following the allegation made by the Dalai Lama about the excess of the Chinese Army, a sensational photograph started doing the rounds in the internet. The photograph showed several army men in uniforms holding folded Robes. The Dalai Lama’s office said that it was the army men in these robes had rioted in Lhasa on March 14, 2008. Some of the netizens, mostly Chinese, researched on this photograph, which shook the world and found that the summer uniforms worn by the policemen in the picture was something out of the question for March 14 in the Lhasa cold. Another fact which questioned the credibility of the photo was the the absence of shoulder badges, worn by all PAP servicemen since 2005. Further online discovery gave the lie to what the photograph was supposed to be: it had been originally uploaded on a website linked to the Dalai Lama’s ‘government-in-exile,’ with the caption reading: “This photo was apparently taken when monks refused to act in a movie, so soldiers were ordered to put on the robes”. [Source: Frontline]
What the article did was, blast the claims, of western media and the neo-journalism rampantly available in India, of “fair and truthful” reporting. Often these media uses the excuse of “lack of onsite access” to guise their partisan coverage of issues which are mostly provided by the parties for whom they are reporting or just plain hearsay based on the editorial bias. I have lost the count of misinformation, provided on the basis of hypothesis and just mere conjecture, by the Indian media.
Credits: Parts of the article published in The Frontline have been used in this post.
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