On March 31, the Independent Election Media Monitoring Delegation found strange contradictions in connection with the opposition vote-burning article of Telex. Telex published an article titled "Discarded postal ballots found near Marosvásárhely" about how civilians found several bags of burned postal ballots at a landfill in Transylvania. Without exception, the votes in the photos were cast for one of the opposition parties. about the topic here.

As Transzparens Újságírís writes, after reading the article, one can easily get the feeling that someone in Transylvania threw away the postal votes cast for the opposition.

However, the Election Media Monitoring Delegation drew attention to an interesting phenomenon in connection with the article. According to Google, the article has a URL dated February 1st.

It is interesting that the voters in Transylvania could only receive mail ballots on March 15. In connection with the strange case, the editor-in-chief of Telex also spoke to  the Foundation for Transparent Journalism. As Dull Szabolcs wrote, "the article appeared on Transtelex this morning at 8:55 a.m.," and according to his claim, " when the article was accepted into our editorial system, a technical error occurred with the dating, it jumped back to a random time, we fixed it immediately."

The foundation draws attention to the fact that "bouncing back" was not explained in detail, and the error certainly had serious consequences. If we accept Telex's claim that a technical error really occurred, then the article should have been deleted the moment the error was noticed in the editorial office. ", they write, emphasizing at the same time: the fact that the URL of the article showing a February date is available raises serious press ethical and political concerns.

The foundation writes about this: according to the interviewed IT professionals, URL "slipping" does not happen by itself or because of a single misclick, it requires several incorrect steps. According to them, Telex should have provided a detailed report on the technical reasons that caused the situation. In the absence of this, all news related to postal votes was received with skepticism by the press and the reading public.

"The meeting with the international Election Media Monitoring Delegation, which we initiated earlier regardless of the case, could have provided an opportunity for clarification, but to our sincere regret, Telex did not want to receive the Delegation," they concluded in their announcement .

Source: Mandarin

Image: Youtube