UPDATED: See below.
I just pulled a blog entry after only recently posting it and editing it 97 times.
It was about a “breaking” news story from CTV Newsnet, concerning Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla and her purse being ripped-off in the Punjab, in India, where she is visiting.
CTV Newsnet reported about it in a way which, the more I looked at it and thought about it, lacked the kind of fullness, clarity, and proper context that I would have liked. [You can see the CTV story as I saw it, here]. I blogged based on that story, so my tone was wrong, in retrospect, I think.
CTV played rather alarming tape from an Indian TV news channel.. It seemed (to me) to have wrongly implied that Dhalla’s reaction to the news that the young kids who stole her purse were then allegedly beaten by police, was, in the words of the Indian TV news anchor, “shockingly callous”. They played tape of her saying to reporters there, “I cannot control what the police does but I know in my speech … [inaudible and not in English] … I hope that those young kids learn from this incident.”
I now think that chances are, this was reported way out of context, and wrongly on the part of the Indian news channel.
I feel as though it wasn’t made clear by Indian TV that Dhalla actually had no clue the kids were allegedly beaten by police when she made her above comments to the reporters there. Nobody had told her! At least that’s the angle I’m going with.
They did acknowledge that afterwards (a day later), she displayed “compassion” for children in her new comments, and they played that tape as well. But they let the original words just hang there, unexplained.
It wasn’t Dhalla who behaved or reacted badly—it was the Indian TV news channel. CTV didn’t explain it very well. The CTV online story was more clear.
So I thought better of my original blog entry’s tone and decided to scrap it altogether. I now know why I felt the need to edit it 97 times.
Clearly we can see once again that the news media everywhere can stink.
UPDATE:
Canada’s left-wing state-run CBC.ca’s report includes this remark, which I would call totally misleading:
…Following reports of the beating, Dhalla was quoted as saying she “cannot control what the police do … and I hope that those young kids learn from this incident.”
Times Now television called her response “shockingly callous.”…
The words “Following reports of the beating” totally mislead the reader, I think, into believing that the “reports” were reported to HER, and to which she then responded by saying those “callous” words. But unreported in the CBC.ca version of the story, Dhalla had already said quite clearly that the reports weren’t reported to her —not until the next day, when according to the same Indian TV news cited above, she then demonstrated “compassion” toward the children, and in fact said she’d ask for an official inquiry. In other words “reports of the beating” were circulating, yes, but not yet to Dhalla, who was busy making a speech and was engaged in other activities, while the horrible news was festering.
Here’s an example of somewhat better reporting, and it’s from a story in the Globe & Mail by Jane Taber: “Ms. Dhalla said it wasn’t until the next day when the media spoke to her that she heard allegations the children had been beaten and jailed overnight.”
[Originally posted 2008-01-09 04:15 PM PST]
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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