KARPOS ALERTS ETHNOS.GR OF ISLAMOPHOBIC REFRAMING OF THEIR ARTICLE
Recently, Get The Trolls Out Greek partner organization Karpos found an article initially published on ethnos.gr that was reproduced on the website of defence-point.gr, with one slight catch. The reproduction of the article included a change of the original title from “Vitriol attacks: From the Greece of the deceived of the ‘30s to the harsh law of Pakistan” to “Attacks with vitriol: ‘weapon’ of sexual revenge, an instrument of Islam”.
This variation in the title falsely primes the article’s readers to view Muslims and the religion of Islam as dangerous threats when religion was not even mentioned in the original article, and further promotes fear and hate against all Muslims. Additionally, defence-point.gr did not acquire consent from the author of the article, thus acting in a journalistically unethical manner.
Karpos wrote directly to the writer of the Ethnos article to inform him of the incident:
Dear Mr. Tzianidis,
We are contacting you on behalf of Karpos, which participates in the pan-European Get the Trolls Out program run by the Media Diversity Institute in the UK. This also includes organizations from France, Belgium, Germany and Hungary. The purpose of the program is to conduct weekly media monitoring in the media of each country to detect sources of intolerance and reproduction of negative stereotypes that affect the population of each country based on its religious background.
We are writing to you about your article published on 22/5/2020, on the website of the newspaper Ethnos, entitled: “Vitriol attacks: From the Greece of the deceived of the '30s to the harsh law of Pakistan”.
In the context of monitoring and recording hate speech in the media with religious groups, we found the reproduction/republishing of your article from the website defence-point.gr with a varied title, “Attacks with vitriol: ‘weapon’ of sexual revenge, an instrument of Islam”, which we consider to be attempting to create negative impressions of a particular religious group.
Since in your text you are not referring to a religious group or doctrine, we considered the above distortion on the occasion of your text not only indicative of the existence of rhetorical hatred in the media, but also journalistically unethical. We are going to inform the people in charge, but we wanted you to be aware of the incident if you wish to take action.
Yours sincerely,
The Karpos team
