These days more and more people are shifting from newspapers and in part from TV channels to their corresponding e-versions.
I used to read a couple of newspapers in the morning but now I just point my browser to BBC and other news websites when I want to know what’s happening in the world.
With this fundamental shift in how we obtain information, it is of paramount importance that our sources be reliable and up to date.
Unfortunately, this is not the case – as our conventional newspapers/TV channels lift content from the internet (without quoting) and not with enough knowledge on the topic.
During this, they miss out information or misrepresent facts. You don’t have to look far and deep to confirm this.
The author seems unaware that the movie in question, “The Tourist” actually stars Johnny Depp as a lead, not Brad Pitt. Furthermore the article says that it’s Angelina Jolie’s and Brad Pitts’ first movie together, which is wrong. Their first movie together was “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” which premiered in 2005.
This is simply unacceptable. Geo is a major player in the news and entertainment market and them publishing such inaccurate articles is a travesty. One wonders how many of their other articles go published without any sorts of checks and verifications.
Here’s another example.
The irony is they claim to be the number one newspaper in Pakistan. The link to the firewall in question is: http://swaf.seecs.nust.edu.pk/project.php
As you can see it’s actually a project being offered to the finals year students at NUST. Here’s an excerpt from the project description.
“Semantic Web application Firewall is a research group in UG block at ground floor (SEECS)”
The article claims that the firewall was actually designed by a leading Japanese company and NUST professionals aided the development. – insert a facepalm here – Its quite clear on the homepage for the SWAF that NUST are working in close collaboration with a Japanese company DTS mainly and not the other way round.
One might think that the reporters just grab random parts of interesting news from internet and color it according to their taste.
IF this is so, which seems the case, I question their claim of being the number 1 newspaper. Being the best also means to produce the best stuff, a fact being ignored apparently.
The bottom-line is that major newspapers and TV channels need to realize that the editorial and reporting quality that goes into their channels and news should translate to their internet counterparts too. With inaccurate articles like these, they are only losing readers as well as being made punch lines of jokes.
Thanks to Bilal Bajwa and Kamran Bukhari for tipping us on this
