AL-jazeera’s Report from the Somali region of Ethiopia; Real or Fabrication.
In this age of media scams and scandals, of paid opinion and information warfare, of partisan power plays and the corrupt nexus of Big Media and Big Politics, Al-jazeera and its amateur reporter Mohamed Adow have resorted to parroting lies and distortions about the Somali region of Ethiopia to achieve lazy equivalence of journalism by manufacturing events and interviewing allegedly Ethiopian victims but actors cleverly arranged by ONLF operatives in Ifo refugee camp, to get opposing allegation that is supposed to be damming and embarrassing to Ethiopia. In a series of lies which Al-jazeera has advertised for weeks to the world with such exaggeration and sensation, most of us were shocked to see such poorly manufactured lies and amateurism from Al-jazeera, a news organization that doesn’t make a secret its anti-Ethiopian bias. But let’s take a closer look to Al-jazeera’s amateur reporters who claimed to have visited the Somali region of Ethiopia secretly and filmed what was supposed to be Addis Ababa brutality against its own Ethnic Somali citizens. After weeks of advertising a few propaganda clips from ONLF terrorist archives, what do we get instead? A few more clips of ONLF terrorists supposedly training in the bushes of the Somali region and a few clips of interviews of actors and ONLF terrorists masked as victims of Addis Ababa brutality in IFO refugee camps and Ogaadeen Kenyan pastoralists paid and coached for their interviews. What kind of journalism is this? Who are they kidding? What were Al-jazeera Editors thinking?
I’m from the Somali region and I know its trains, topography, and vegetation. I have little doubt that the pastoralists shown in the video clips are not our nomads in the Somali region of Ethiopia. I also have no doubt that most of the filming was done in Kenya and everyone shown in the poorly produced clips are ONLF operatives, paid actors and people associated with ONLF terrorists. This isn’t the first time these amateur and partisan reporters have tried to defame Ethiopia with their unfounded fabrication. But let’s look very closely at Mohamed Adow who was Al-jazeera's bureau chief in Mogadishu, Somalia before he was kicked out because of his partisan reporting against the TFG government and its ally Ethiopia. This is a guy when he was reporting from Mogadishu, has consistently and repeatedly made up things, exaggerated, or embellished facts. To put it simply, Mohamed Adow is a serial exaggerator, and is a guy connected to Al-shabaab insurgency and the former ICU, that his reporting was as expected one sided all the time. As a result, most of Al-jazeera’s reporting and consequently Mohamed Adow’s failed to meet the pillars of good journalism: thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency.
While in Mogadishu, Mohamed Ado’s function become political and instead of reporting fairly from all sides and all angles of the conflict in Somalia, he went to an extent to create a desired political result for Al-shabab and the now defunct ICU by reporting a grotesques amount of weird, stupid and coarse content along with manufactured controversy that masqueraded as news through Al-jazeera. Clearly, before he was finally asked to leave Mogadishu and the rest of Somalia by the TFG, Mohamed Adow was doing things that are outside the jurisdiction of journalism and was involved in activities that were well outside the scope of what you would expect a journalist to be doing in their scope of reporting. And that is, wearing two shirts. That of the insurgency and that of reporter. It’s not surprising then that Mohamed Adow now becomes the spokesman and chief propagandist of another terrorist organization that has innocent blood all over its hands. What surprises me the most is the low standard of journalism exhibited by Al-jazeera and its ideology and religious driven editors who displayed a complete lack of any journalistic standards in their network, and how easily they were manipulated into believing, some video clips straight from ONLF propaganda archives, and others filmed from villages in Garrisa, Kenya in conjunction with ONLF.
Finally, Al-jazeera network has failed two journalistic objectives: fairness to those concerned with the news, in this case the Citizens of the Somali regional State and Ethiopian government and a professional process of information gathering that seeks fairness, completeness, and accuracy. While we expect Al-jazeera to demonstrate ideological biases in regard to Ethiopia, as predicted by the networks structured biases, the network and its amateur reporters, have gone outside the practice of journalism. Al-jazeera which has been labeled in the west as the channel of Bin laden can now be labeled as the channel of ONLF terrorists. What Al-jazeera has presented to us isn’t Ethiopia’s brutality, but, a fabricated, and manufactured pieces of ONLF propaganda video dressed as news. In fact, what Al-jazeera presented to the world were unfortunately staged by ONLF operatives and were selected in my opinion by Al-jazeera not because of their news worthiness, but frankly for their strangeness as much for their significance, their emotional appeal as much for their import.
Mohamed Adow can't mask his affiliation with the terrorist ONLF rebels and is using Al-jazeera to furthering his own overt and hidden agendas. The extent of his ONLF affiliation is evidenced by the fragmentation of his story about the Somali region and his failure to tell viewers a coherent narrative about the Somali region of Ethiopia. Al-jazeera network has also failed to show a single verifiable clip of video from any small town, village or city from the region. What was evident and couldn't be masked is the network's use of ONLF produced propaganda videos, and turning it into a product of an alleged brutality by Ethiopia against its own citizens. What Al-jazeera’s amateur reporter did here was reprinting stories and reproducing video clips from the archives of ONLF as facts without any factual checks. He has also engaged in theatre journalism by putting together video clips of ONLF actors and ONLF operatives indulged in a loud and attention tit grabbing sensationalism and shock value stories and ordeals allegedly in the hands of their own government.
Faysal Abdinoor
faysalnoor8@yahoo.com
VOA 13pm GMT
IslamOnline
