Korybko To The Hindu: Pakistan’s Dawn Newspaper Plagiarized Your Inaccurate Quoting Of Lavrov
Both Dawn and The Hindu are professionally obliged to correct their inaccurate quoting of Lavrov, with the first-mentioned also having to apologize for their unnamed correspondent plagiarizing the second. Failure to do so would discredit whichever of them declines to do so, whether due to embarrassment or whatever other reason.
The scandal surrounding the inaccurate quoting of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s criticism of the Quad by top Pakistani newspaper Dawn, which I responded to here by urging them to correct their reporting, took a curious turn after it was revealed that they plagiarized their passage from The Hindu. That second-mentioned outlet is a top Indian newspaper, and it turns out that it was they who were the ones who were the first to twist the words of Russia’s top diplomat.
While Dawn admitted that they were reporting on The Hindu’s article about the Quad’s joint statement in their piece that I first came across, they didn’t reference its title, nor could anyone have expected this prestigious paper to plagiarize it. Their two countries are engaged in a well-known rivalry so it reflects extremely poorly on Pakistan that one of its top information outlets literally copied and pasted that passage from an Indian counterpart.
It wasn’t until I later sought to search for The Hindu’s article that I found out that Dawn plagiarized from it. They probably thought they could get away with it since that Indian newspaper paywalled the piece after informing me that I’d already reached my free article limit. I still remained curious about how they reported on the Quad’s joint statement, which can be read in full here at the official White House website, so I typed the URL into Internet Archive as a workaround for obtaining access to their article.
Someone saved the piece on that platform, which can be read here, after which I found out that Suhasini Haidar and Ananth Krishnan were the first ones to inaccurately quote Lavrov. My criticism of Dawn’s unnamed correspondent for deliberately doing this and thus producing a piece of disinformation about Russian-Indian relations is thus equally relevant for those two as well. After all, like I argued in my response to Dawn, they’d have read what he really said on the official Russian Foreign Ministry site here.
That being the case, those two writers from The Hindu engaged in journalistic malpractice by misquoting him in order to artificially manufacture the false narrative that his purposely decontextualized and twisted words represented “criticism” of the Quad’s joint statement like they wrote in their article’s subtitle. The truth is that Lavrov didn’t criticize the Quad as a whole in his remarks like I explained in my response to Dawn and those words themselves weren’t shared in response to its joint statement either.
Haidar and Krishnan misled their audience by writing that “The joint statement that refers to both the Ukraine conflict and the situation in the South and East China Seas, draws criticism from Russia and China”, after which they decontextualized and twisted Lavrov’s words to align with that false narrative. Dawn’s unnamed correspondent then plagiarized their passage in that top Pakistani newspaper’s report about the Quad’s joint statement, thus leading to a multinational disinformation scandal.
Considering this, both Dawn and The Hindu are professionally obliged to correct their inaccurate quoting of Lavrov, with the first-mentioned also having to apologize for their unnamed correspondent plagiarizing the second. Failure to do so would discredit whichever of them declines to do so, whether due to embarrassment or whatever other reason. Readers are therefore encouraged to hold both of them to account by sharing this article under their social media posts to ensure that they’re aware of it.