Nigerian terrorists got free ink in the Baltimore Sun while the company that employs their victims, Shell Oil, got nothing, not even an acknowledgement from the Sun's reporter that the group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).
That's the gist of my latest story at the MRC's BusinessandMedia.org.
Here's a taste:
One country’s terrorist menace is one
Sun reporter’s insurgency. Baltimore In his December 18 article, “Paying the price for resistance,” Sun foreign reporter Scott Calvert gave readers a snapshot of a “violent insurgency that has forced a 20 percent to 25 percent cut” in Nigerian oil exports.
Yet even as he quoted an e-mail warning “to all oil companies in the delta” that “your nightmare has not even begun,” Calvert left out any reference to the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) as a terrorist organization in his more than 2,600-word article.
“I don't like Shell,” Calvert quoted one sympathizer, referring to the Dutch oil company. “They cause so much problems. We have youths who don't have work to do. Sometimes they get up and say, ‘Look at these people taking oil; let's go and meet them,’” said 37-year-old Mosco Johnny.
Calvert left out any defense of Shell Oil from either the company or from an industry expert, although he did quote veteran oil contractor John Anderson, who insisted “the military government seemed to keep a tighter rein on the problem” than the current civilian government does.
Even so, Calvert added that the British-born
can “understand their plight, with all the poverty.” Anderson
