Wednesday, September 06, 2017

A distorted headline can create a wrong impression

Someone sent me an email. He expressed the view that Salleh Marican and Farid Khan are more suitable for the role of Elected President due to their business experience and asked for my comment.

I replied to his view in my Facebook page. I expressed my view that Halimah Yacob does not appear to have the financial knowledge and experience required for the responsibility of looking after our reserves.

A website put the headline that "Tan Kin Lian, ex-CEO of NTUC Income, said that Halimah Yacob had poor financial knowledge".

This headline was a distortion of my view. I do not know the level of Halimah's financial knowledge. Most likely, she has the financial knowledge of well informed people.

I was referring to a higher standard of financial knowledge that is needed to "look after our reserves". Most people do not have high level of knowledge. That is why the constitution required a candidate from the private sector to be the top person in running a company with $500 million in share capital.

This is an example of how a headline can distort the actual meaning intended by a person and can create a wrong impression.

I wrote to give my feedback to the administrator of the website. They have removed my article. But the damage had already been done, as their distorted headline and photo had been circulated to large numbers of people.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

She doesn't need to have financial knowledge what she needs to have is the 3 letter word 'YES" vocabulary. This is what the gohment expects of the friendly president. 3 million dollars a year to say 'YES' is good incentive.

Anonymous said...

On the same line of argument, that just shows the media generally have very poor judgement and like to sensationalise information.

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