EXCLUSIVE: Widely loathed across Sydney and the entire nation for its sloppy journalism and equally racist worldview, the Daily Telegraph has managed to out-do its own stupidity once again, this time by falsely and wrongly depicting an innocent Chinese noodle restaurant as Sydney’s “worst” when it comes to food hygiene. Serkan Ozturk reports.
It’s a case of Chinese noodle shops looking all the same for the racist fools who happen to work at the giant News Corp tabloid, the Daily Telegraph.
In a story published a month ago, and still up for public access, the Daily Telegraph promised to “name and shame” the worst restaurants in Sydney when it comes to poor hygiene and food handling practices.
In the story, headlined ‘Revealed: Worst NSW suburb for food safety fines’, the Daily Telegraph claims that the inner-west Sydney suburb of Burwood is the state’s “worst” for food hygiene.
“One NSW suburb accounted for more than a third of all food hygiene fines issued in the last 12 months by the NSW Food Authority. See how your suburb ranked,” the Daily Telegraph teaser reads on its website.
The problem though – and a pretty big one at that, too – is the tabloid newspaper decided to illustrate its story depicting Sydney’s “worst” restaurants with a close-up photo “naming and shaming” a completely innocent restaurant in Burwood.
The photo accompanying the article shows the popular 1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle restaurant on Burwood Road, even though according to the NSW Food Authority’s public “name and shame” register the restaurant has not been fined at all over the past 12 months.
The register also shows the restaurant has not been prosecuted by authorities in the past year for any breaches.
So how did the Daily Telegraph get it so wrong, once again?
It seems like it was a case of mistaken identity and yet another example of the sloppy and haphazard journalism one has become used to expecting from the Daily Telegraph, widely known as the ‘Daily Terror’.
Because a quick look at the NSW Food Authority’s register shows that it is in fact a Chinese noodle restaurant almost directly opposite the road and with a near-similar name that has come to the attention of authorities on at least six occasions.
That restaurant, the actual offending one is called 1915 Lanzhou Beef Noodles.
1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle restaurant in Burwood: Completely innocent of any penalties, yet the Daily Telegraph used a photo of the restaurant depicting it as Sydney’s “worst” (Image : Supplied)
1915 Lanzhou Beef Noodles: The actual restaurant that should have been been depicted after receiving six penalty notices in 12 months for poor hygiene and food handling practices (Image: Supplied)
Not content with making a grave journalistic error depicting a completely innocent restaurant as Sydney’s “worst”, the Daily Telegraph further compounded its mistake by advertising the story on Facebook (Image: Supplied)
To make matters worse, the Daily Telegraph chose to share the story along with the accompanying wrong photo depicting the completely innocent restaurant on its Facebook page, where they also “boosted” the post by paying the giant social networking site some cash to essentially advertise its own silly mistakes and lack of journalistic rigour and fact-checking.
At the time of publishing, the social media post had just under 600 likes and other reactions, as well as scores of comments.
True Crime News Weekly has left a message for the owners of the 1919 Lanzhou Beef Noodle restaurant alerting them that their business has been defamed by the Daily Telegraph by being depicted as Sydney’s “worst”.
The restaurant has been closed for the past few months because of the lockdown brought about by the Covid Crisis in Sydney since late June.
True Crime News Weekly also contacted the Daily Telegraph by email, pointing out its serious errors and asking whether the newspaper and news website would be apologising and pulling down its story with the false accompanying photograph as well as the corresponding Facebook post.
We did not receive a response.
Likely perhaps because the powers-that-be within the corridors of the Daily Telegraph are too busy cooking up their next wholly factually incorrect piece of news and bits of hobbled-together propaganda.
Ni hao Lanzhou!
Grab a lawyer. Litigate!!