AAP Newswire carried a story about a special request to members of the community by the NSW Police’s Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad commander Detective Superintendent Ken McKay.
The request concerned a spate of shootings in Auburn. AAP Newswire made a slight error, referring to Auburn as a “south-western Sydney suburb”. In fact, Auburn is hardly a suburb or two away from Parramatta, and is regarded as being in the geographical heart of Sydney.
The story appeared on the website of the Sydney Morning Herald under the headline of “Mid-East community urged to help police”.
The story also appeared on the Sunday Telegraph’s website. And the headline? “Community urged to give up shooters”.
Nowhere in the story did anyone made any request of any community to give up anyone. The sole request reported in the story was:
We are urging the Middle Eastern community, particularly those families living in the Auburn area, to continue to provide us with valuable information which will help us to put a stop to these incidents.
The request was for information. The request was NOT for a community to give up people it is allegedly hiding. Nor does the request suggest the community knew who was responsible. All the police requested was “valuable information” that that could help them protect Auburn communities.
The Telegraph headline was written in a provocative manner, suggesting that Middle Eastern communities knew who was doing the shooting, and that these communities were hiding the culprits from police. In other words, the newspaper was suggesting that these communities were involved in the crimes.
How else does one explain the headline? Can Tim Blair or any other senior editor at the Tele explain the headline?
The same headline also appeared on the article reproduced on the website of The Australian. How do the editors of The Oz explain this? Is this yet another example of what certain Oz columnists describe as the perennial struggle between “conservative Islam and Western modernity”?
Some may say that this is just one headline of one story. Yet this is just one headline out of a long series of headlines. One needs only to read analyses such as those of Peter Manning to realise how destructive such choice headlines are.
Or maybe the News Limited people follow Hitler’s saying: “The grosser the lie, the more readily people believe it”!
© Irfan Yusuf 2006
