Why ‘copy-and-paste’ is harming tribal people
by David
The threat of ‘copy and pasting’ doesn’t sound like the most pressing concern for tribal people – not compared to mega-dams, gold-mining, illegal loggers and racism, anyway.
But what if it’s false or damaging information that’s being copied and pasted?
That’s precisely what happened recently after a misleading article by Peter Beaumont in The Observer about the recently published photos of an uncontacted tribe in Brazil near the Peruvian border.
Newspapers and radio stations worldwide started reporting the photos as a ‘farce’, ‘fraud’, ‘fake’ and ‘hoax.’ Nothing could be further from the truth.
The fallout from the Beaumont article has been chronicled by well-known Brazilian journalist, Altino Machado. Machado is from Acre, the remote Brazilian state where the photographed tribe lives, and has worked for some of Brazil’s major newspapers.
‘Peter Beaumont copied what he had read and drew conclusions about an issue he doesn’t know anything about,’ Machado writes in an article for Terra Magazine, a Brazilian publication, noting in passing that Beaumont is a ‘specialist on the Middle East.’
But worse, Machado writes, was still to come. Beaumont’s article was read by journalists all around the world and, after a lot more copying and pasting, newspapers, radio stations and blogs published or broadcast stories based on it, without checking their facts.
Machado remarks that this ‘disinformation’ and the media’s ‘traps’ would have been welcome news to the Peruvian government and the loggers who are invading uncontacted tribes’ territory in Peru.
And why wouldn’t it? The spread of such ‘disinformation’ makes it only more difficult to have the uncontacted tribes’ existence recognised and their land effectively protected from the loggers by the government. On top of that, it undermines the work of Survival and many other organisations pushing to make that a reality.
Read Machado’s article in Spanish and in Portuguese.
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:47 am
I think this is a very annoying. After reading about this the first time I wrote a complaint to the observer saying Beaumont\’s journalism is no better than an uneducated blogger and the harm he has done is incalculable.
Arrogant journalism seems to constantly cause so many terrible consequences.
August 11th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
That’s the fate of new media.
Its so common to read- imagine and re-write.
from blogs- to- newspapers. this the way. Modern Media?