Addis Ababa, August 12, 2021 (Walta) – Many media outlets have chosen to distort the statement released by the Office of the Prime Minister yesterday calling all Ethiopians to guard their nation against further incursions and hostility of the terrorist group TPLF.
Media monitoring and analysis conducted by Ethiopia’s Current Issues Fact Check indicates that several international media have orchestrated an attack on Ethiopia following the statement issued by the Office of Prime Minister to call citizens and security forces to quell terrorist TPLF.
The Office of the Prime Minister released a statement in which a call was made to all Ethiopians in every comer to guard their nation against the further incursions and hostility of the terrorist group TPLF.
The statement intended for our population of more than 100 million, has been of course positioned and presented to an international audience by many media outlets in a skewed way and in a manner consistent with most International media reporting since November 4, 2020.
A scan of most of the headlines issued yesterday August 10th following the release of the statement is telling of intentional misrepresentation.
After an audible silence for weeks not fully raising the alarm on the hostility of the terrorist group TPLF and the atrocities the group has committed in Amhara and Afar regions, most have chosen rather distort a nation’s call for survival as a call against Tigray.
All headlines fail to show the perpetrators (TPLF) against which an entire nation has risen, rather framing the Government as the perpetrator instead.
The utilization of ‘Tigray forces’ was purposely utilized to draw divides within communities. Considering that ‘Tigray’ is a region within Ethiopia, headlines continue making it seem like Ethiopia is at war with a separate state called Tigray and with Tigryans.
Similarly, using terms like ‘Tigray forces’ and ‘Tigrayan forces’ in efforts to depict the national call in a manner that is against an entire regional state or a people of a regional state is tantamount to purposely intensifying divides in a sensitive situation. International media houses are equally culpable in spewing divisive narratives.
Most of the headlines and the content of the stories continue to deny through silence and turn a blind eye to the role a terrorist organization TPLF is playing in wreaking havoc in the stability of the country, rather choosing instead to continue blaming the Prime Minister as an individual.
AFP issued a piece ‘Timeline of Ethiopia’s Conflict’ riddled with a myopic view of events and purposely calling into question the rule of law operations launched in November 2020 in response to TPLF’s attack of the Northern Command. The undermining nature of the piece, like most other ones that pull into question TPLF’s aggression when the TPLF itself admitted to having taken pre-emptive strikes against the Northern Command, is questionable.
The continued character assassination of the Prime Minister evident in most pieces tike copy/paste scripts among media houses are characteristic of how little effort the media is exerting to understand the context and continuous oversimplification of the overall situation as just a single story.
AP’s and the Washington Post’s continued sympathetic narrative to a group designated ‘terrorist’ in a Constitutional process raises a lot of concerns for the standard of ‘non-partisan journalism’ that many media outlets pride themselves for.
The refusal by most international media outlets to acknowledge that a sovereign nation and its parliament have designated TPLF a terrorist group and the aggrandizement of the terrorist group is tantamount to misinforming the world purposely.
These are among a few of the examples that constitute orchestrated gross misrepresentations of a country of more than a 100million, a gross misrepresentation of a people, a government, and the head of state in favor of a rebel group.