PHOTO CAP : After Pakistani newspapers incorrectly reported that leaked U.S. cables contain damning information about India, Pakistani nationalists condemned the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and burned American and British flags on Friday.
As the Guardian’s Islamabad correspondent Declan Walsh reported, several Pakistani newspapers appeared to fall for a hoax on Thursday, by publishing articles supposedly based on leaked American cables obtained by WikiLeaks that turned out to not exist.
The fake cables described by articles, including one on the front page of The News, were said to contain damning information about India and generally supported the worldview of hawks in Pakistan’s military and intelligence services.
The Lede explained on Thursday that both the Guardian and The New York Times, which have copies of all of the leaked cables, performed searches of the full archive and were unable to find any cables even remotely like those described in the Pakistani press.
On Friday, two Pakistani newspapers that published articles based on the fake cables, The News and The Express Tribune, published retractions.
The Express Tribune apologized to readers for its article, “WikiLeaks: What U.S. Officials Think About the Indian Army,” explaining: “It now transpires that the story, which was run by a news agency, Online, was not authentic.”
The News blamed a local news agency, reporting:
A story filed by a news agency about purported WikiLeaks cables disclosing India’s involvement in Balochistan and Waziristan, carried by The News, Daily Jang and many other Pakistani newspapers, has been widely criticised as not being accurate. The prestigious British newspaper The Guardian described the report as “the first case of WikiLeaks being exploited for propaganda purposes.”The report said that US diplomats described senior Indian generals as vain, egotistical and genocidal, and that India’s government was secretly allied with Hindu fundamentalists. It also claimed that Indian spies were covertly supporting Islamist militants in the tribal belt and Balochistan.The story was released by the Islamabad-based Online news agency and was run by The News and Daily Jang with the confidence that it was a genuine report and must have been vetted before release. However, several inquiries suggest that this was not the case.
The News added, “A check on the Internet as well as The Guardian report showed that the story was not based on Wikileaks cables, and had in fact originated from some local websites such as The Daily Mail and Rupee News known for their close connections with certain intelligence agencies.”
Pakistan’s Daily Mail, which is an Islamabad news site unrelated to the British newspaper of the same name, has a reputation for reporting unreliable conspiracy theories that serve to deflect blame from Pakistani officials. In September, The Lede pointed to a post headlined, “How To Plant Idiotic Stories,” on Cafe Pyala, a blog that looks at the Pakistani media. In that case, Cafe Pyala traced a fake news story suggesting that a Pakistani cricket scandal was actually a nefarious Indian plot back to the local Daily Mail, which it called, called Pakistan’s Daily Mail, “the purveyor of all conspiracy theories headquartered in Islamabad which pretends to be a global paper.” Cafe Pyala added, “its focus seems plainly to be crude propaganda about India. No points for guessing who’s probably behind it.”
In a post about the articles based on the fake cables on Thursday, Cafe Pyala noted that the newspapers reported their source as simply, “agencies,” before asking, “How stupid do the “agencies” really think Pakistanis are?”
On Friday though, one Pakistani blogger stuck by the idea that Islamabad’s Daily Mail, alone among the world’s news organizations, had somehow come into possession of cables obtained by WikiLeaks that no one else has seen. Ahmed Quraishi, a Pakistani journalist, blogger and conspiracy theorist, refused to admit that the Daily Mail story he had made so much of a day earlier was based on cables that do not exist.
In a post headlined, “Ignore Guardian’s Claim Of ‘Fake’ India WikiLeaks,” Mr. Quraishi, citing no evidence, insisted that the Guardian and The Times must be lying, writing:
Substantial parts of the story in Pakistani media is correct. It’s only that The Guardian and the other newspapers are misleading the world public opinion by a selective focus on the things they want from WikiLeaks cables.WikiLeaks did a good job of exposing US bully diplomacy, and here comes NYT, Guardian and 2 or 3 other ‘partner’ newspapers of WikiLeaks to selectively release the material to suit US policy objectives.
Source : Guardian
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