Sometimes these April Fool stories get out of hand…

Whoa they are such dicks aren’t they

The BBC do have a lot of stupid people though: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/2012/06/01/research-at-the-bbc/

Granted, the Daily Mail have more of them, but they are not publicly funded.

What PAGE did they put the apology on?

Andreas – if you’re just going to comment on here to put links to your blog, I’m going to have to ban you from commenting.

‘On April 1st we said incorrectly that the Labour Leader Ed Milliband was secretly employed by the Russian government. We now accept that this was not the case.

Our report could also have been taken to suggest that Mr Milliband was a lab-grown genetic experiment. That was not our intention and we are sorry for any misunderstanding or embarrassment these errors may have caused.’

Awesome excuse to wedge some factoid into their readers heads with the sure knowledge that any retraction won’t have the same sticking power.

I’ll never forget the day I got to work and we were told to come into a room for a talk about the Daily Mail and how we should react if they called, or if any other paper called.

They had reported that the wife of our company’s boss (then a hopeful Parliamentary candidate – now and MP) was running a prostitution ring.

She of course was doing nothing of the sort. She was a nice woman who had been a model when she was young and had set up a modelling agency with some friends that provided, in its simplest form, eye candy for corportate launches and events.

Various half-quotes from her website had been used in the article to hint at stuff that no one reading the actual website would ever have concluded. Needless to say their double page splash was not matched by the much smaller apology they were required to print some time later.

@Margin4error

I would make them do a 2 page spread apology, in the same font & format, with a point by point rebuttal of the previous story!

However, given the reporting standards & adherance to the truth the Daily Mail displays on a variety of subjects, your average paperboy will need an FLT licence to deliver it!

And as for the other papers…

I wonder what would happen to the supposed rightwing bias of this country, if all newspapers were forced to be truthful and accurate in their reporting – after all, the only way they could carry on publishing is by being truthful

It does frustrate me.

It would be such a simple change to the law, or the Newspaper’s voluntary code:

“Any retraction , must be published in the same section of the newspaper as the error was, with a same size heading over it”

So simple to describe that rule and so simple to police it.

And surely it would make newspapers think twice?

Maybe if you wanted to be really draconian – you’d also insist the retraction had to be run on 2 consecutive days, not just one !

Just Visiting

Either that, or they go bankrupt!

Endless retractions of fraudulent claims, malicious gossip, facile innuendo, hypocritical moralising etc by a point by point rebuttal would make the output of both Associated News and News International cripplingly expensive to publish!

annoying they’ve taken the story off the website. Who’d do such a thing!! Actually, reminds me, what happened to that story about the Boris Cable car’s being run under Dubai law? Wasn’t that on this liberal conspiracy website? Or perhaps I’ve got it wrong, who could possibly be dull enough to think that jurisdiction is established by a unilateral assertion (as in “sorry, we’re going to have to chop your hand off, we run this house under Saudi rules”).

Tjamesjones

You mean they’ve taken it off after being caught out!!!

Censorship helps the guilty in this case. I would force them to keep it on, with the rebuttal, permanently. It did after all become public domain once published, so the damage was already done. The rebuttal would be like a loose cannon in their credibility!

Ah yes the Daily Wail – a newspaper which sees a communist plot in a piece of blank paper.

it’s not a blank piece of paper, there’s a coffee ring on it….

“Andreas – if you’re just going to comment on here to put links to your blog, I’m going to have to ban you from commenting.”

Hear hear!

Just Visiting: agreed. That rule, or one like it, would be very simple to create and would prevent newspapers getting away with ongoing smears by printing front-page libels followed by whispered retractions.

I also suspect papers manage to pull off the same thing in the “spirit of fun” by printing April Fools’ articles that make damaging claims about political figures they dislike, then announcing the joke in a much less-read part of the paper the following day.

“Our report could also have been taken to suggest”

How could it not have been taken that way?

The Daily Mail is not a paper it is a person an Editor who is paid to put out the “stories” It would be clearer if this nonsense of free pressism could be boiled down to citing who commanded the reports and who is paying for them. Their names.

The Daily Mail is not a paper it is a person, an Editor who is paid to put out the “stories” It would be clearer if this nonsense of free pressism could be boiled down to citing who commanded the reports and who is paying for them. Their names.

Piane
Stretching the definition of “person” there, the ones that decide on the kind of stories published are ultimately advertisers & shareholders (both behind the cover of limited liability). Then there’s the proprietor – who may or may not be the majority shareholder. People like Paul Dacre are merely patsies who have a face that fits…

As a recent ex-editor of Associated News will tell you – if she had the spine to admit such a thing – once your perceived usefulness to the corporate line has passed, you find yourself thrown to the wolves in no time at all.

Who is willing to bet that behind closed doors the successor is informed to toe the line ever more rigidly. Que even more dodgy articles…

oops sorry, I meant News International in previous post!!!

@9 Just Visiting – I thought that was a PCC rule already? That it had to be on the same page and same area as the original article – but how would that apply to stories published only on their website?