SMH found guilty of misleading story on Tamil Tigers
The Australian Press Council has upheld a complaint against the Sydney Morning Herald over its reporting of the final stages of the civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers.
According to the judgment, published by the SMH today but not yet online on the APC website, an article was misleading and inaccurate in its cover age of a UN report into an incident where surrendering Tamil leaders were allegedly killed while under a white flag. The headline on the report was “Australian entangled in a final act of civil war“.
The UN report had said that it was an incident about which it had been “unable to reach a conclusion”. However, the paper later quoted from another part of the report, referring to different incidents which said it was “unable to accept the version of events held by the government”.
The APC ruled: “The council considered that the UN report’s reference to government unreliability did not relate to this incident and that reference should have been made to the report’s inability to arrive at a conclusion about the incident. These problems led to the article being misleading and lacking in balance. Accordingly, the complaint is upheld on those grounds.”
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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Please fix the spelling in this article. The mistakes are very distracting.
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Sounds like Fairfax attempted some journalism, even if they got it wrong.
Do their sites still have the auto-start videos and bandwidth wasting auto-refresh? I added them long ago to my spam-block list.
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Now the challenge to the pretending heros at Sydney Morning Herald is to give equal or better publicity to this news item. This is the only way they can show that they are neutral, not manipulated by one group or another using money and most importantly that they have balls!
The news item may now have a title : “Sydney Morning Herald entangled in a final act of misleading people“.
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SMH never even attempted to give required publicity to the positive effects brought about by the Sri Lankan Govt’s success in defeating the LTTE to the country and the region. A few debatable incidents during the last phase of the war was discussed widely as per the SMH’s agenda and not based on facts.
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They must be ripe for takeover with the share price at 69 cents
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After a string of outrageously biased reports against Sri Lankan Gvt, and in favour of the ruthless terrorist outfit Tamil Tigers by SMH, it’s good to see this report. Now SMH owes it to the Australian readers factual reports on Sri Lanka without the false propaganda of the Tamil separatist lobby that spends millions of dollars to spread lies.
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Biased reporting against the Sri Lankan Govt is nothing new in the Australian Media whether printed of visual. The LTTE rump still spends big dollars canvassing support of media people. They just repeat anything and everything that comes from the LTTE camp but simply refuse to publish or broadcast the other side of the story. A case in point is the ABC’s Four Corners report titled “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields” I know that no such thing happened because Real Time aerial pictures were shown to almost all the foreign diplomatic people by the Sri Lankan Air Force. The Australian people deserve to know the truth.
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Wow, Sri Lanka has excellent astroturf.
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