“Residents forced to clean common areas for seven months”?

So, another day, another mountain rises out of a molehill.

The earth moved on 28 May when the TODAY newspaper published this shocking headline:

“Forced” leh.

By whom?

Dunno.

So you read the report to find out. Wah, this one is big issue ah.

Wah piang! For “SEVEN” months residents and developer had to clean and maintain the common areas themselves” wor!

So when did the residents move in to their flats?

TODAY says some had “moved in as early as October” 2014.

Please note this date hor – October 2014.

In the report, TODAY say it was “residents and developer” leh, but how come TODAY’s headline only say “residents”?

Let’s look at that headline again:

Wah! Talk about read the right thing!

But nehmind.

You wait for the truth.

And you wait … and wait…. and then… almost one month later, the truth comes!

On 25 June, the same TODAY reporter, Ng Jing Yng, says:

Remember I said please note the date of October 2014? Here is why.

Ms Ng says that the developer had to clean the areas between “November and June”.

TODAY said the earliest residents had moved in only in October.

Yet TODAY said earlier that “for SEVEN months” residents and the developer had to clean the common areas.

And TODAY even highlighted the part about the residents having to do the cleaning as its headline story, although it was the developer which had cleaned the areas for the most part of seven months!

And the developer had started cleaning from November – just maybe a few weeks after the residents moved in!

Wah, talk about standard quality journalism ah!

What it appears to be, in fact, is that the residents had to only clean maybe a few weeks (or less) of their corridors when they first moved in lah.

Most of the so-called “SEVEN” months’ cleaning was done by the developer from November onwards lah!

But of course if you are a government newspaper with a political agenda, you must make sure people “read the right thing”!

And so you highlight that “residents” had to clean the areas instead of the developer, which would be more accurate.

But seriously, how dirty can the corridors of brand new flats be? Is there a need to make such Everests out of … nothing?

Yes, please read the right thing! Really!

This article was first published on Read The Right Thing.