Several Western Mainstream media have covered the conflict in Ethiopia widely. However, most of these reports were lopsided, favoring the culprit of this conflict, the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF), and accusing and condemning the Ethiopian government at every chance. Enigmatic maneuvers to entice more attention to superficial headlines and intentionally embedded falsified facts and opinions were the salient features of most of these news articles. The picture international consumers of these media outlets would get from these media is often very different from the events that have actually happened. As a result, many people familiar with Ethiopian politics over the past few decades wonder whether they should trust these media outlets, even when reporting about other countries.
A few weeks ago, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed referred to the TPLF as “cancer” and “weeds” in his statement. Not long ago after that statement, the media waged an astute campaign that the Prime Minister referred to the people of Tigray as “invasive weeds’’ and “cancer.” This gave the impression that he declared the entire ethnic Tigrayans are “weeds” that need to be eradicated. And these media have intentionally amplified this sentiment.
At the BBC’s NewsHour, one of the hosts interviewed Minister Zadig Abraha, minister of Democratization, and parroted the same deceptive talking points. “The prime minister said six million Tigrayans are invasive weeds and cancer.” the host asked with bold tone “is it helpful though the Prime Minister of a country, to refer to people who are his citizens, whatever you think about the TPLF, ‘he said the country is facing an enemy which is the cancer of Ethiopia, and these Tigrayans were invasive weeds.’ Is it helpful to refer to Tigrayans in that way?” Little did she know that the person she was regurgitating these words to is himself a Tigrayan.
Moments after that show, on Twitter, the writer of this article reached out to this host and asked if she could point out where Mr. Abiy said those words about the people of Tigray. Not surprisingly, she sent him a handful of news articles that echoed the same unwarranted accusations. He asked once again, clarifying that he did not deny Mr. Ahmed used those words, but only the interpretations of context that he referred to Tigrayans as invasive weeds. The crux of the question was whether Mr. Abiy referred to the entire Tigrayan population as “weeds.” How did the show host know that the original statement was in Amharic and that the host is not an Amharic speaker? Her reply was that she did not know, but she was merely echoing other seemingly reputable sources. She was in the media fetish campaign of character assassination wittingly or ignorantly.
Although many western media share this sentiment, the New York Times and CNN are the most vicious and sinister in their relentless accusation of the Ethiopian government, the Ethiopian national defense forces, the regional militia, and the Eritrean troops who participated in the war early on. Since the start of the conflict on November 4, 2020, the New York Times has produced 57 articles, including Opinion pieces and news articles about the war or relating to it. Most of these pieces were authored by a journalist named Declan Walsh. On November 4, on the date the war started, the New York Times published an article that stated: “Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, began a sweeping military operation against one of his own regions.” Under the headline “Having Made Peace Abroad, Ethiopia’s Leader Goes to War at Home.” See Here. The Paper did not bother to tell its readers how the war broke out; however, it hinted that Mr. Ahmed waged war without any provocation. The superficial and trusting readers would be tempted to think the war broke out with the federal government taking an offensive measure against the government of a regional state — the actual sequence of events was the exact opposite!
On June 21, 2021, the same journalist wrote, “on November 3, 2020, Senator Coons had a telephone conversation with Mr. Ahmed. And Mr. Coons warned the Prime Minister about the perils of using military force in Tigray.” What is bustling about this statement is Mr. Coons never called Mr. Ahmed, let alone warn him about the perilousness of the then possible war. In fact, on November 3, the eve of the U.S. Election, Mr. Coons was busy campaigning for his reelection. According to Senator Coons website, that telephone conversation was held on November 23 about three weeks after the start of the conflict.
That was a disingenuous attempt by the New York Times to make the Ethiopian government the aggressor in this conflict and the TPLF the victim. However, after a social media backlash, it quietly erased that assertion and blamed the error on Mr. Coons’ Memory lapse. The correction reads: “After publication, Senator Coons remembered that he had spoken to Mr. Ahmed in late November, not before the U.S. presidential election.”
The presidential election was not a reference to anything. The correction should have been that Mr. Coons did not call Mr. Ahmed before the conflict, which occurred on November 3, 2020. But, it is the New York Times, and the article is about Ethiopia. This potentially severe and consequential disinformation was glossed over with a simple correction.
After some eight months of the start of the conflict, in June 2021, the Paper announced its reporters were in Tigray embedded within the TPLF. Then the Paper stocked a flood of articles with misleading headlines. Examples include:
Tigrayan fighters press Ethiopian Military Out of Regional Capital;
Ethiopian Leader stung by Condemnation denies troops were defeated;
Tigray Leaders say they will take the fight into Eritrea;
Tigrayan Forces march thousands of war captive through streets;
A Battered City Rejoices after Ethiopia’s retreat;
The lopsided reporting hit a new high on July 12, 2021, when the New York Times published a front-page story under the title “Like a Flood; Tigryans join Fight for Honor.” Notwithstanding the congratulatory tone of the headline, the article praised the recruitment and deployment of child soldiers by the TPLF. The caption “Highly Motivated Young Recruits” appears in this article under a photo of children marching with rifles to TPLF camps. That article was met with rebukes from thousands of its readers, and the newspaper was forced to remove the images from its website. The photographer would then issued a cease and deceit letter prohibiting the reproduction of these pictures bearing child soldiers without his approval. No formal acknowledgment of the wrongdoing was provided. The New York Times would double down on its crusade against Ethiopia on August 21, 2021, when one of its reporters, based in Nairobi, Kenya, claimed: “The roots of the conflict can be traced to last November when Mr. Abiy ordered a military offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.”
That claim was patently inaccurate and purposefully deceiving. Still, the New York Times cared little for the integrity of its stories about Ethiopia, a well-understood media bias against developing countries.
As if the biased reporting hitherto was not enough, the New York Times produced another malicious article on September 1, 2021. On that day, the newspaper published an ambiguous headline about TPLF’s looting of USAID warehouses. A few days before New York Times published this article, Mr. Sean Jones, Mission Director of USAID Ethiopia, in an exclusive interview with Ethiopian state media, blamed the TPLF for the looting of humanitarian supplies from USAID’s warehouses in the Amhara region. Mr. Jones emphasized:
“I do believe that the TPLF is very opportunistic. It is plundering food aid from starved people in the region. They have looted and completely emptied our warehouses, particularly in the Amhara region in areas where they have gone into.”
USAID’s public reprimand of the TPLF was welcomed by most Ethiopians who know that the TPLF committed more cruel crimes in the Amhara region, including but not limited to the looting of Aid supplies. Thus, Mr. Jones’ statement was an affirmation of what most Ethiopians knew about the nature of the TPLF.
The disingenuous part of this saga was the New York Times’ word choice in its news article. The headline for this story reads: “Ethiopian Rebels Looted American Aid Stores, U.S. Official. says.” The U.S. official that The New York Times quoted here never uttered the phrase “Ethiopian rebels,” he unequivocally said “TPLF.”
So, why did the New York Times need to equivocate the culprit of the looting? Was the switch to “Ethiopian rebels” to refer to the TPLF an innocuous mistake on the newspaper’s part? Certainly not! The New York Times never used this phrase to refer to the TPLF in the past. The Paper has published about five dozen articles since the conflict’s start. In all of these pieces, it used crafty headlines to refer to the TPLF.
This is also an extension of the sly crusade against Ethiopia, deliberately using an equivocal headline to blame Ethiopia for the TPLF’s plunder. When the newspaper condemns the Ethiopian government, it is razor-sharp accurate. When it blames the TPLF, its ability to equivocate is unparalleled.
The New York Times also knows that a misleading headline hurts a reader’s ability to recall the article’s details. In this case, although the story states that Tigrayan fighters looted USAID’s warehouses, elsewhere in the body of the story, it is the headline “Ethiopian Rebels Looted American Aid Stores, U.S. Official Says.” that linger in readers’ memory.
The disinformation in this article goes beyond the title, however. The reporter quoted a Twitter statement of Mr. Getachew K. Reda, TPLF’s mouthpiece, who stated:
“While we cannot vouch for every unacceptable behavior of off-grid fighters in such matters, we have evidence that such looting is mainly orchestrated by local individuals & groups.” Beyond blaming the locals, Mr. Reda never said the Amhara’s are to blame for the looting. The New York Times article, however, claimed Mr. Reda’s tweet blamed Amharas.
While the focus of this article was the biased reporting of the New York Times, mainstream western media, such as CNN, the Washington Post, Financial Times, the Economist, BBC, Al Jazeera, and so on, have had, at one time or another, engaged in similar misleading reporting. This is the reason why most Ethiopians nowadays have lost trust in mainstream western media.
In the past, the New York Times reporting was a big part of why America invaded Iraq. In 2003, Judith Miller wrote a series of exclusive, front-page stories on Saddam Hussein and his alleged capacity to produce Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). At the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, most of the Times’ readers believed Iraq possessed WMD. After the invasion of Iraq on the wrong premises and the loss of lives, including that of American soldiers, Miller’s reports were discredited, and she spent 85 days in jail for not revealing her confidential sources.
On a similar trend, Declan Walsh is the new Judith Miller, and this time the country is an old African nation and a close ally of the United States. The New York Times is engaged in producing articles that lack solid evidence, and Americans are deceived into believing a consequential and purposefully distorted account of events. One would recall Marx’s cliched quote — “history repeats itself first as tragedy, and second as farce.” Except that the lives of over 110 million people are hardly a farce.
