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Daily Mail: Indian Media Confirms What Pakistani Media ‘Retracted’
‘WikiLeaks Gives A Shut-up Call To Indian Media,’ Says The Pakistani Newspaper
Indian media publishes what Pakistani media groups apologized for | More leaks confirm The Daily Mail’s report that was carried a day later by others | Wikileaks starts posting cables from US Embassy in India on its site | Wikileaks claims having 1,300 secret cables from US Mission at New Delhi | The Guardian’s claim and Indian media’s stance of no cable about India from US Embassy amongst the Wikileaks database evaporate suddenly | Indian newspapers publish new Wikileaks against India | Indian papers publish what US Ambassador to India wrote about 26/11, Why Karkare was killed? | Certain Pakistani media houses termed the same report as fake, apologized for publishing the facts
SPECIAL REPORT | Monday | 12 December 2010
WWW.PAKNATIONALISTS.COM
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Thanks partially to a Pakistani report on leaked US diplomatic cables on India, the WikiLeaks rushed to announce it had 1,300 cables on India which it will release over the next few days. The first dump released over the weekend confirms some of the content of the Pakistani report, which UK’s the Guardian newspaper decided was ‘fake’ and two Pakistani newspapers hurriedly supported and ‘retracted’ without an independent assessment.
This comes after three journals – the New York Times, the Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel – manipulated the release of the first 1,300 cables and used them to write biased stories targeting countries at odds with US and Nato policies such as Russia, Pakistan, China, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
The Daily Mail, the feisty Islamabad-based broadsheet that broke the Dec. 8 controversial report, published an investigative report yesterday headlined, ‘WikiLeaks Gives A Shut-up Call To Indian Media’, based entirely on Indian media reports on leaked WikiLeaks documents that NYT, Guardian and Der Spiegel failed to release earlier. [click here to see a picture of the front page]
WiliLeaks gives a shut-up call to the Indian media by expediting the release of US secret cables from New Delhi and confirming some details in the Pakistani report
The Mail said in its report: “Just one cable from a former US Ambassador to India David Mulford, out of some half a dozen, posted by Wikileaks on its website, clearly confirms around 80 percent of the contents of The Daily Mail’s report that was published by [Pakistani] newspapers a day later and for which they later apologized.”
The paper listed the following headlines from prominent Indian newspapers on Dec. 11 that support its earlier report:
- ‘Congress Played Religious Politics After Mumbai Attacks: WikiLeaks’ Times of India, Dec. 11, 2010
- ‘Hindutva forces may have been involved in terror strikes – a memo by then US ambassador implies political forces might have been at work on 26/11’ Deccan Chronicle, Dec. 11, 2010
- ‘Karkare feared for his safety from Hindu extremists’ Deccan Chronicle, Dec. 11, 2010
- ‘Hours before death, Karkare told me his life was in danger’ Hindustan Times, Dec. 11, 2010
[click here to see these headlines in the respective newspapers]
All of this confirms much of the content of the controversial Daily Mail report, published on Dec. 8. [An independent wire service, Online News Agency, picked the story without citing the source. Next day, Dec. 9, several Pakistani newspapers used the story without mentioning the original source]. The Guardian claimed it had combed through its database of leaked cables, which WikiLeaks handed over for release, but couldn’t find any supporting details on India.
According to a review by volunteer editors at PakNationalists.com, The Guardian was incorrect. Some of the claims in the Mail report, such as a US diplomat describing former Indian army chief Gen. Deepak Kapoor as an ‘incompetent combat leader’ and another one saying the incumbent Indian army chief Gen. V. K. Singh was ‘egotist’ and ‘self-centered’, are indeed yet to be sourced back to actual US cables. But other claims in the report are proving correct.
In addition to the evidence presented by Daily Mail, a PakNationalists.com columnist published a report lst week quoting US ambassador to India Timothy Roemer’s cable of 16 Feb. 2010 calling Indian military “slow and slumbering”. Roemer also ridiculed Gen. Kapoor’s Cold Start military doctrine and described it as a ‘mixture of reality and myth.’
As for Indian involvement in terrorism in western Pakistan using Afghan soil, secret cables from US embassy in New Delhi to be released in the next few days will reveal details of the conversations that US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns had in India in July 2009 where a US official, for the first time, confronted the Indians about the role Indian consulates in Afghanistan played in exporting terrorism into Pakistan. [Here is an exclusive story with details published by PakNationalists.com on Mr. Burns visit.]
The fact that WikiLeaks has taken notice of the biased and selective release of US cables by NYT, Guardian and Der Spiegel prompting the website to expedite the release of 1,300 cables from US embassy in New Delhi has buoyed the publishers of the Daily Mail, which sees this as vindication. The editor-in-chief of the paper marked the occasion by running a special front-page editorial on Saturday titled, ‘Publisher Of WikiLeaks On India: ‘Any Inconvenience To Indians Is Regretted’ .
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ahmed Quraishi, curryman. curryman said: Daily Mail engaging in classic propaganda: mixing lies with truth. So does shooting the messenger – http://bit.ly/hukG6v [...]
Much more worrying than the alleged controls over the Indian media is what transpires in the media in Pakistan. The latter blows out of all proportion everything that is negative and disparaging about the country while downplaying the positive aspects. There is nothing wrong with criticism provided it is constructive and relevant. Criticism for the sake of criticism, blowing out of proportion and sensationalising negative stories for weeks on end is a different issue altogether and raises a whole host of other questions.
Evidently the India media know the detrimental effect it has on the morale in the country and steer clear of the game. They are doing a good service to the country in guarding her image in the eyes of people at home and abroad. One can only wish that the same could be said of the media in Pakistan. According to an industry insider, out of some 6o or so TV channels in Pakistan only five or six are making money. The rest are all losing concerns. One of these has been allegedly losing more than thirty million rupees a month for years. What and who makes it possible to sustain this magnitude of loss? The answer to this question should be quite revealing.