Fake story on Google porn search tarnishes nation

Letters

THE front page story in the other daily newspaper (Jan 17) headlined,“PNG ranked number one in porn searching” is totally false and misleading.
How many times have we heard about Papua New Guinea’s image being tarnished by poor and pathetic journalism.
This particular news reporter has provided fake news to tarnish the names of our good provinces and the country.
Does that mean every Western Highlanderor other provinces mentioned search for porn on Google?
More than 80 per cent of our people are in the villages and don’t know how to use smartphones.
Amazingly, NCD didn’t even hit any percentages on porn search.
That is a ridiculous report by a reporter who needs better training on investigative journalism.
It seems the newspaper is trying to do is lure readership by publishing fake stories on the front page without any substantiated and credible facts.
I question the reporter’s knowledge and research of the information.
We are a nation of only eight million people at last count, of who the majority are illiterate and do not surf the internet — compared to the rest of the world.
In my research, I’ve discovered that whatever that was printed on the paper was second-hand information and outdated.
The reporter actually copy-pasted an article that was on the ABC news website, written by former PNG correspondent Liam Cochrane. The article was updated on Feb 26, 2015, which is almost two years ago.
Here is the link. http://mobile.abc.net.au/…/papua-new-guinea…/6262028.
What Cochrane reported was correct at the time the news was updated.
According to Google trend, PNG was ranked No.1 for searching the word “porn” in February 2015 alone.
Any dates that come before or after that is wrong and totally misleading.
The news editors were — for want of a better word — too blind to substantiate the story and had it published on the front page.
That information was outdated!
Currently, the most searched word in PNG on Google is “Facebook” and is not “porn”.
This is clear example of fake news that the world is currently talking about.

Malai Oka Tiki, Via email