Sunday, November 28, 2010

Wikileaks Release: The Hindu Edits Out Key Parts of The Guardian's News Item

Today's lead news item in The Hindu is a verbatim reproduction of The Guardian's front page news about the Wikileaks documents. However the most substantive and interesting elements of the The Guardian's item dealing with Afghan corruption, Chinese perfidy, the Putin/Berlusconi relationship and of Saudi donors bankrolling Al Qaeda have all been removed. Here are a few paragraphs mentioned in The Guardian's item not found in The Hindu version:

  • Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government, with one cable alleging that vice-president Zia Massoud was carrying $52m in cash when he was stopped during a visit to the United Arab Emirates. Massoud denies taking money out of Afghanistan.
  • How the hacker attacks which forced Google to quit China in January were orchestrated by a senior member of the Politburo who typed his own name into the global version of the search engine and found articles criticizing him personally.
  • The extraordinarily close relationship between Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, which is causing intense US suspicion. Cables detail allegations of "lavish gifts", lucrative energy contracts and the use by Berlusconi of a "shadowy" Russian-speaking Italian go-between.
The Guardian's item reads "The cables name Saudi donors as the biggest financiers of terror groups...". The Hindu has changed that to read "The cables name countries involved in financing terror groups...". The reference to Washington's agreement with the government of Yemen to cover up the use of US aircraft to bomb Al Qaeda targets in that country has been omitted.

The omission of China and Saudi Arabia are easily explained but I am not sure about the rest.

Update: Thanks to Ananthkrishnan for clarifying on twitter that The Hindu has carried these facts (mentioned in the above post as being omitted) in its international news page. This is a link to that item taken from the New York Times.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

On Twitter RT @ananthkrishnan @acorn
that is absolute rubbish.
we carried it on our
international page http://
bit.ly/fwhfES. u shld know
better than to spread
that ;)

Xinhua Ram said...

After China, now LiC wants to shield Saudi Arabia too! Saudia Arabia, the secular liberal democracy!
This one belongs in the Hall of Shame. What a fall for the newspaper!

kuttychathan said...

Xinhua & Pilid, no surprise about chindu's effort to shield Saudi & China. What is surprising is its effort to shield Afghan rulers. I thought chindu's sympathy lay with Al Qaeda.

Hindu Fundamentalist said...

that still doesn't completely explain why the original guardian article was edited. the bit replacing saudi donors with countries is jarring. the editing was obviously done with an intention.

Xinhua Ram said...

Who is this S Rajendran?
The guy is trying extra hard to impress LiC with BJP bashing.

Scam-struck BJP takes it out on Deve Gowda

It is another matter that the JD(S) has only bounced back every time an attempt was made to rout it.