Sunday, February 08, 2009

More poor reporting from The Times

The Times continues to demonstrate a knock-Dubai agenda with its spin on the Queen's cancellation of her Spring tour.

All the other news outlets say that the tour destination has not been announced although it's generally believed to have been to various Gulf destinations. Buckingham Palace says the cancellation is due to an overcrowded schedule but the other news outlets speculate the cancellation is almost certainly to do with her age and Prince Philip's health.

The Times alone takes a very different approach.

Their print edition headline is : "A further blow for Dubai as Palace blames cancelled visit on diary clash."

The online edition has the story headed "Queen cancels state visit to Dubai and Abu Dhabi."

They also ramble on yet again that 'police have found more than 3,000 cars' abandoned at the airport by fleeing expats.

They embellish it with even more nonsense this time. The cars they tell us are"mainly Mercedes and large 4x4s""

This time they've managed to use the correct title of Ruler rather than Emir as they used before. They couldn't keep the accuracy up though, they name the Ruler of Abu Dhabi as 'Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan'.

Imagine the ridicule if our papers said that England's monarch was Prince Charles.

It would be fascinating to discover why they're suddenly attacking Dubai. As
Alexander notes on his comment to my previous post, they do seem to be grinding an axe.

It's sad to see these plunging standards in a newspaper which through its long history, until recently, was one of the world's most respected.

If you think I'm exaggerating, have a look at the cancelled tour reports from a wide range of other news outlets and then read the way The Times have slanted it.


Press Association.
BBC.
Daily Telegraph.
Independent.
Daily Express.
Daily Mail.
The Times.

4 comments:

bwana_daoudi said...

There does indeed seem to be a lack of unbiased reporting on the situation in Dubai. It takes on cynical, if not sadistic tone at times.

Alexander said...

Nope. The Times has now run three heavily slanted Dubai stories in less than two weeks.

The errors in them are unpardonable.

I think we are either looking at a very dodgy local stringer sending gumph over to London or Mr. Murdoch's trying to set our boys here up so they'll bail out Newscorp...

Seabee said...

Alex,There has to be a reason behind it. It could be one of the Dirty Digger's 'I'll be nice to you if you're nice to me' ploys of course. Or the very dodgy stringer you mention. Or someone who's been upset somehow. Or all the above. I'd love to know.

Bwana, I hate biased reporting of any description, which includes the fawning 'Dubai's the only place in the world to be' nonsense they were writing until very recently.

Anonymous said...

Well, I guess this just about says everything about the news. It may not be all the time and it may not be all but we have to make some of our own reservations and take time to analyze the reports all the time. After all, not all new these times are news that we should rely on. the internet must've dilluted the way information is transferred these days.

Ana Casuncad