As the feeding frenzy against the BBC continues, it’s worth remembering the UK’s public broadcaster isn’t the only organisation to sometimes make editorial mistakes. There isn’t a major national newspaper that hasn’t made serious false allegations against someone or other. Indeed, unlike in some of the examples below, the BBC at least had the good sense not to name the person it wrongly suspected of a crime, though it was naïve to think the name would not get out eventually.
Yet the BBC is attracting far more venom than any other news organisation would if it had made similar mistakes. Before Fleet Street gets too carried away with attacks on the corporation, it might want to remind itself of its similar screw-ups. As far as I know, there were no calls for “radical structural change” at any of the papers as a result of any of the following mistakes:
The Sun pins the Norwegian mass shooting on ‘Islamists’
Before we knew who had shot 77 Norwegian young people on 22 July 2011, the Sun had a guess: Islamists. Its front page referred to an ‘”al Qaeda’ massacre” while its editorial used the attacks to have a go at asylum seekers and human rights law. The paper quietly changed the editorial on its web edition when it emerged the massacre had been carried out by right-wing fanatic Anders Breivik.
The Telegraph accuses Labour conference of heckling an 11-year-old child
During this year’s Labour conference a delegate interrupted a 16-year-old explaining to the hall what she liked about the academy school she attended. The delegate had shouted out of turn: “you can do that in a comprehensive too”. On the Telegraph’s site this somehow became the Labour conference ’heckling’ an ‘11-year-old’ ‘child’, an accusation which grew into a Twitter-storm, only ending after Ed Miliband issued a statement. The paper later toned down the inaccuracies in the piece on its website but the web address for the article still reads “it-is-disgusting-for-a-labour-delegate-to-heckle-an-11-year-old-girl/” and refers to a “child”.
The Guardian jumps to conclusions during the phone hacking scandal
One shocking detail of the Guardian’s investigation into phone-hacking that captured the public’s imagination was the allegation that someone working for the News of the World had deleted murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s voicemails. The voicemails’ disappearance had given “hope” she was alive, the parents said. But police investigations later found no evidence to support this claim, which arguably had propelled the story to new heights. The police said the messages were “most likely” deleted automatically by the phone network after 72 hours.
The Independent wrongly accuses a politician of taking $150m from a foreign autocrat
Accusing a politician of illegally accepting $150m from a foreign autocrat to fund a political campaign is a serious claim, and the Independent accused Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of a Tunisian political party, of doing just this. Had the allegation been made against a UK politician it would have been one of the biggest political scandals in the UK’s history, but the story passed relatively unnoticed here. Last month the paper admitted that what it said had happened had not happened, and published a small apology.
The Daily Mirror wrongly accuses Chris Jefferies of associating with paedophiles and being linked to a murder
Searching for a suspect in the murder of Joanna Yeates, the Daily Mirror and other papers settled on retired schoolmaster Christopher Jefferies. The paper accused Jefferies, who was Yeates’ landlord, of “behaving inappropriately” to schoolchildren, associating with paedophiles and being linked to a previous murder. None of this turned out to be true.
The Daily Mail wrongly accuses teacher of leading a riot which trashed Tory HQ
In the aftermath of a riot at Conservative party headquarters the Daily Mail fingered Luke Cooper, a university tutor from Brighton, as a “hardcore” organiser of the riot, which led to over 50 arrests and tens of thousands of pounds worth of damage. The Mail’s sister paper, the Evening Standard, splashed the allegations on its front page. Nearly two years later, the papers’ publisher was ordered by the High Court to pay £450,000 in costs and £60,000 in damages to Cooper, who says his reputation in education was “trashed”.
The Times invents radical Islamist “control” of a North London mosque
The Queen’s Road mosque in Walthamstow is under “control” of the “ultra-Orthodox” Islamist sect Tablighi Jamaat, making it “easy prey for terrorist recruiters”, the Times alleged in 2009, casting suspicion over an entire community. After being contacted by the leader of the Mosque, and some lawyers, the paper later conceded that this was not true, but not after suggesting the Mosque was a “breeding ground” for “extremists”.
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