Instant childish reaction to LOL, but that is actually really, really terrible.
In their defense, it WAS part of the Whoresley show.
We need only one piece of legislation to encourage journalistic integrity & proper fact-checking: ALL retractions and apologies are required to be printed on the front page, above the first story.
Final Paragraph.
While they may have good reasons for removing the original article–such as not wanting to risk someone missing the correction–such a removal always strikes me as “We did something stupid, now we’re trying to cover it up”. It’s great that they’ve taken responsibility and posted a correction, but, in the digital format, it doesn’t seem like it would be hard to correct the article itself. And they could add a “We regret the earlier error” at the end.
Call me nitpicky but I remember several years ago when Elsevier was caught deleting articles from some of its electronic archives. They had good reasons–some of the articles were plagiarized, for instance–but these were digital copies of the print publications, and there was no explanation why, when a patron would click on an article title in the table of contents, they’d get “404 not found”. It took a court order to stop them. It was a solemn reminder of how tempting it must be for some publishers to rewrite history.
Given the UK’s libel laws I don’t know if the newspaper made an error, or if the person in question really is or was a prostitute at one time, but they paper isn’t willing to press the point.
It was hilarious.
It was better the first time around. NIPPLES.
Oh come on man, in the case of Mr Horsley, it was a pretty forgivable mistake to make:
Well that was uncomfortably informative.
I was reminded of that uncomfortable conversation from Meet the Parents:
“I have nipples, Frank. Could you milk me?”
It seems to me that there was an equal chance of her being called a horse.
Mark Thomas’s People’s Manifesto had a suggestion that all corrections and retractions be printed at the same size and in the same position as the original story. I thought it was a brilliant idea then and I still do now.
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