The fraudulent ‘quoting from each other’ game

A few days ago, in a column to a newspaper a UNP bigwig strongly attacked the government while castigating the NSB, The Finance Company Ltd, the EPF and the Colombo Stock Exchange. To buttress his arguments, he quoted extensively from a letter conveniently published in the business pages of the newspaper concerned, the previous day, from a Mr Sunil Mendis, whom the UNP big gun claimed was the former Governor of the Central Bank.

However, immediately upon the article being published, the former Governor of the Central Bank, Sunil Mendis wrote in protest to the newspaper, completely disassociating himself from the statements in the article, and stating that the alleged letter that he was quoted from had never been written by him. In response, the newspaper stated that they are sorry and that they genuinely believed it was the former Governor's letter. But any thinking person will know that this is not so simple.

In fact, it is clear that the bigwig and the daily have indulged in the age-old tactic of quoting from a bogus letter supposed to have been written by an important personality, and thereafter used that false quotation to give credence to a hard hitting article. In this instance, a letter to the Editor, ostensibly from the former Governor of the Central Bank ('expert') was conveniently 'planted' in the newspaper, to thereafter enable the 'independent' columnist to base his article on a quote from the 'expert'. And then, hey presto! There appears a super story, corroborated by an 'expert' as well. The UNP resorts to this operation, and the big gun, is probably one of the greatest 'experts' in the subject.

The UNP has carried out this operation for a long time in the past too with different players.

But, as always, these new undercover operators too will be exposed in due course, as were the others. Then, they too will be discredited and thrown into the dust-bin of history. However, by then, the UNP will have found some new actors to play the same roles. In the meantime, the nasty game of 'quoting from each other' will go on and some poor readers will get deceived, at least for some time, although fortunately, these hoodwinkers cannot deceive all the readers, all the time!