When Is An Apology Not An Apology

When it's in the Daily Mail apparently. I'm very late to this story about the Daily Mail from the indispensable Tabloid Watch blog, but it's an instructive case nonetheless. Having accused a senior medical consultant of saying that babies born at 23 weeks should be left to die, the Daily Mail then did some research and found out they'd got it wrong (always a danger when the research bit follows the writing bit). So they apologised. Somewhere deep in the US section of the paper, just where you'd an expect an apology on a health related story to be!

Tabloid Watch reports that the apology was eventually moved, and thank loads of people for tweeting the error, which may have had an impact on the Mail decision.

But if you think the Mail's bad, have a look down the TW stories for some great Express misnomers. I'm not sure anyone who reads the Express for serious news reasons actually has much of a brain to speak of, and they certainly shouldn't qualify for the vote, but they will definitely have been taken in by the front page headline that the EU are to ban shopping bags. Turns out that by 'ban' what they meant to say was 'hold a consultative exercise with no determined conclusion yet'. I guess that simply doesn't read as well in the headline.

Tabloid Watch, and the equally excellent Media Blog, should be must-reads every morning, before we dare embark on the evidence-less rumour-mongering that masqurades as news in our daily papers.