The website banner for shahamat-english.com, an English-language website of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
A Daily Beast story about Taliban’s ruling council meeting for peace talks in Pakistan “violates the basic principles of journalism” and is “nonsense,” according to the Afghan Taliban. That’s not as bad as having your news organization banned on Reddit, but it’s still gotta hurt.
The Taliban’s critique, below, in full:
Yesterday ‘The Daily Beast’ newspaper, which pursues a malicious intelligence agenda and is run by famous intelligence agents, published a far from reality, purely propaganda based and fabricated report regarding the Islamic Emirate which stated that some leaders of Islamic Emirate had met in the Pakistani city of Islamabad, showed their inclination towards peace and other such nonsense…….
We reject every aspect of this report. The assertions cited by ‘The Daily Beast’ are contrary to the policy and manifesto of the Islamic Emirate and similarly the talk about conflict between the leaders of Islamic Emirate in also propaganda and devilish scheme of the said newspaper which has no substance. We urge all media outlets to be cautious of such pure propaganda which has no reality to it and is the work of intelligence agencies.
We have designated spokesmen and a dedicated website for our activities from where anyone can contact us to attain access to information. Attributing false statements to the Islamic Emirate and associating unknown figures with us violates the basic principles of journalism. In our view these are vengeful attempts by certain identified persons who wish to spread their own personal agendas through these reports and we ask all independent media outlets to refrain from publishing these baseless reports. We would also like to point out that ‘The Daily Beast’ has on several occasions published such baseless reports to advance their agendas. They also regularly attribute their statements to ‘Zabiullah’ so as to portray it to be me, Zabihullah Mujahid, the spokesman of Islamic Emirate. The truth is that neither I have ever spoken with this media outlet nor has any other official within the Islamic Emirate ever corresponded with them.
The spokesman of Islamic Emirate
Zabihullah Mujahid
29/12/1343
Link: “Remarks of spokesman of Islamic Emirate regarding baseless report by ‘The Daily Beast’” [shahamat-english.com]
(Via Romenesko)