The Cockroach Crawls Majestically

Tariq Saeedi

Ashgabat, 29 February 2008 (nCa) --- An imaginary cockroach crawled across some unshielded brains recently, killing the cells that perform coherent, clear thinking.

The cyber crawl of the cockroach, which was as real as the flying pig, started when a website that liberally mixes fact and fiction reported that 30 TV journalists and other staff had been sacked in Turkmenistan because a cockroach had made his unscheduled appearance at the nine o’clock news show.

The story was probably meant to be a masterpiece of the authors’ imagination but it ended up resembling the reeking accident of their dysenteric mental bowels.

One could have been convinced of at least a remote possibility of such a happening if the authors had not given the number of people who were supposedly fired – this was their undoing.

In their zeal to cook up a super story, they said that 30 persons had been fired as a consequence of the cockroach walk.

Anyone who is familiar with the media structure in Turkmenistan would know that the flagship news show ‘Watan’ is not part of any of the four channels. It has its own staff, its own studio and its own facilities. Except for some talk shows no one shares the studio with them.

The entire staff of Watan from editors and producers to anchors and janitors is much less than 30. One would need to go out on the street, hire some more people, and then fire them immediately to bring the total to 30.

Actually, truth is the last thing on some people’s mind when they are writing a news story.

One could dismiss, even condone, such people as pathological liars and move on but what about all those who wasted no time in repeating the story on their own websites. One gets the impression that the participants of Jerry Springer Show are running all those dozens of websites.

After killing the vital brain cells of all those who swallowed the story hook, line and sinker, the fantasy cockroach became rather ambitious.

Instead of killing one brain sector at a time, it went for en masse killing of reputations of all those websites that were sufficiently naïve to recycle the story.

Ignorance is no defence in law, and stupidity is no excuse in news business.

It takes years to build a reputation in the news business and all it takes to smash this fragile treasure is one invented cockroach; a cockroach that you borrowed mindlessly from some dubious website.

We can do many things in the name of progress but repeating the false news is still not one of them.

Only TV pundits and schoolgirls can quote each other and get away with it, the real life journalists must do some legwork before reporting or repeating a story.

All those cockroach-loving websites have lost their reputation in a single click and hardly anyone feels sorry for them

The cockroach is still crawling majestically.