Thursday 18 November 2010

Express apologises for publishing quotes from fake Twitter account

This apology appeared in the Express on 13 November:

On 24 May 2010 we published an article headed “Sophie Dahl: I’m no weight watcher” containing personal comments that we said had been taken from Sophie Dahl’s twitter page.

We now accept that Sophie Dahl does not have an active twitter page and the comments were invented by hoaxers. The page has now been removed from circulation.

We are happy to make this clear and apologise to Sophie Dahl for any distress and embarrassment our article has caused.

(Hat-tip to Regret the Error)

2 comments:

  1. Lie printed on 24th May, apology printed on November 13th.

    It took Desmonds minions 10 seconds to make up an article about a Twitter post. They probably realised it was fake after a minute or so and still went ahead and printed it. The all-mighty-not-at-all-pointless PCC allowed them to take 5 Months and 21 days (174 days) to admit that this story was total bollocks.

    I hope Ms Dahl takes further action, she won't though, no one ever does, which is why this sort of thing continues.

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  2. Twitter is a feeding ground for lazy journalists. This story is the very reason I'm glad that so many fake profiles exist, hopefully it will expose useless hacks. It's also a reason that Wikipedia vandalism has its uses.

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