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Friday, May 29, 2009

Online Hypocrisy



Times online today (29/05/09) say more than 20000 civilians died in the last few days in Sri Lanka’s battle against LTTE. They base their number on unverified UN sources and unnamed defense experts’ analysis of civilian settlement damage. Leaving the scientific basis of their analysis aside the shameless hypocrisy of “Times online” on reporting civilian casualties is apparent.

Times online is quick to jump to conclusions on Sri Lanka based on unverified documents and unnamed “experts” , and gives these baseless , biased reporting “main story” prominence, but has never given prominence to the Iraq civilian death reports, by UK and US epidemiologists, published in peer reviewed journals. They obscured the reports as lower level news, baselessly disputed the findings reported in peer reviewed scientific journals, and even distorted the findings.

On 14 September 2007, ORB (Opinion Research Business), a British survey group published a report indicating the Iraqi civilian death toll since the war started in 2003 is over a staggering 1.2 million, Times online distorted the main story of this report never reported the staggering civilian death toll but reported that the survey says “Iraqis: life is getting better”.

Two previous surveys by teams of British, US and Iraqi epidemiologist , sponsored by the prestigious Johns Hopkins medical school, and published in the prominent medical journal “Lancet” reported almost 100 000 civilian deaths by the year 2004, due to the war and more than 650 000 civilian deaths by 2006. These reports by experts revealing staggering civilian deaths due to Iraq war was never main stories in Times online, but shamelessly without any basis they even disputed the findings of these studies.

The blatant hypocrisy of “Time online is apparent, why would anyone treat their reporting with any seriousness.

1 comment:

  1. Thank mate for taking time to analyze utter hypocrisy of Times Online UK.

    We know that they allegations are totally baseless, but we are weak in not taking them head on.

    This is wildboar journalism by Times UK. Looks like huge force is backing them up to spew up these false reports!

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