Just saw this story appearing in ‘The Nation’ and released by Associated Press of Pakistan (APP), entitled, “Pakistanis enjoy cheapest broadband service worldwide”. As this story is released by a news agency, there are good chances that it will be picked by other newspaers as well.
The reporter at APP falsely claims that this is a survey report, instead it was a research done by a user at WiredPakistan, which were further coupled with input from other users. Moreover, tsihe reporter copied all the comments from the post that was done by Aamir Attaa at ProPakistani.
This reporter at APP didn’t bother at all to reference the original content producers; instead he/she changed the names of commenter, and cited them as his/her references.
This hasn’t happened for the first time, I keep on watching several stories appearing in main stream media that are lifted from ProPakistani and other online resources, in entire or partial form, without any credit.
I am just wondering, why do we shy/hesitate to give the credit to the original source? We journalists do not produce stories at our homes, we hear/read them from different places/sources, what’s wrong in telling the audience about where they heard/read/lifted this story from? (unless sources request to remain anonymous, or they allow journalists to report without quoting)
I leave this question open for you to discuss in comments!
