Right on cue, the Myanmar government has spun the Daily Mail’s false reporting on human the Rohingya crisis as proof that all claims of human rights abuses against the Rohingya are false. Little do they know about using the Daily Mail as a barometer for international journalistic standards.
It seems they don’t know about the time the Daily Mail tried to stoke fear of immigrants by drawing the opposite conclusion of its source material.
Or the dozens of times the Daily Mail has claimed the same inanimate objects both cause and prevent cancer.
Or the time the Daily Mail celebrated the discovery of a ‘gay gene’ as a justification for abortions.
Unaware of the paper’s history of lapses, the Myanmar government is now treating the Daily Mail like it was a credible publication until it dared to criticize the Burmese military.
On Tuesday, the Daily Mail reported that a video depicting the torture of a small child was proof of human rights abuses by the Myanmar army against the Rohingya, then quietly deleted the story when readers pointed out that the video was actually from an infamous case of child abuse in Cambodia.
Yesterday, the State Counsellor’s Office, headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, posted a rant on its Facebook page condemning the Daily Mail’s error and demanded an apology. The note also condemned reports by the BBC, CNN, Channel News Asia and Al Jazeera about their reporting on human rights abuses in Rakhine State, though none of these reports over the last few months have come anywhere close to being debunked.
Suu Kyi’s office also said the assertion by John McKissick, the UNHCR representative in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, that the Myanmar army is carrying out ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, is “unreasonable”.
The Global New Light of Myanmar, the English-language daily newspaper and government mouthpiece, ran a cover story today titled “False news in UK’s Daily Mail the latest in misinformation”.
The article calls the Daily Mail’s error “only the latest example of inaccurate coverage that has hurt the country’s image”.
“State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and presidential spokesperson U Zay Htay have consistently stated that inaccurate, manufactured news that it being fed to international news organisations is being disseminated without appropriate vetting,” reads the Global New Light story.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the Myanmar government and a large proportion of the Burmese public have long tried to delegitimize claims of abuses against the Rohingya by claiming there is an international conspiracy against Myanmar. But until now, their claims of such a conspiracy have had little to stand on.
(Last year, the BBC reported on photos being shared online with false claims that they depicted violence against Rohingya people. It is worth wondering why we don’t treat the Daily Mail’s reporting the same way we treated those memes.)
Now, with the Daily Mail error, the whitewashers in the Myanmar government seem to believe they have all the proof they need that the world is out to get Myanmar. Someone ought to tell them about the Daily Mail’s reputation before this unsurprising debacle.
And now, please enjoy this Daily Mail headline generator.
