Saturday 24 October 2009

Corrections round up

The Sun - Tabloid Lies reveals the newspaper's latest admission of error over an 'Islamic terrorist' story. The apology to Abdul Muneem Patel reads:


On 29 March and 1 April last year we reported that Mr Patel was an evil terrorist who had been jailed for his part in a transatlantic jet terror plot.

While he had been convicted under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act of possessing material that might be useful to terrorists, the court accepted that he unwittingly held documents for a friend of his father.

Mr Patel has never had any involvement with terrorism acts.

We are happy to set the record straight and apologise to him.

'Happy to set the record straight'? Is that why it has taken eighteen months for the apology to appear?

Septicisle wrote about the original article and exposed its faults when it appeared. So why did it take the PCC and Sun so long to realise the problems?

Elsewhere, the PCC have formerly noted the resolution of the case against the News of the World and the Mail from Fabio Capello and his wife:


The complaint was resolved when the newspaper accepted that internal procedures - warning of Mr Capello's concerns - had failed and that the pictures were published in error. It apologised to the Capellos, gave undertakings for the future, and - at the request of the Capellos - made a substantial donation to the Sir Bobby Robson Foundation.

On a less serious note, this clarification from The Guardian:


Errors appeared in an interview with Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp, who own Frieze magazine and the events company that stages the Frieze art fair.

In connection with part of the piece that quoted them talking about founding the contemporary art magazine, it has been pointed out to us that the masthead of the first edition of Frieze in 1991 listed the founding editors as the artist Tom Gidley and Matthew Slotover, and Amanda Sharp as advertising and PR.

Elsewhere in our article, the 2005 figure of £2.5m should have been given as the art fair’s turnover – fees from visitors and exhibitors – not as its profit; the height of its tent walls should have been given as 12ft not 12m. Amanda Sharp’s surname sometimes appeared wrongly in the piece as Smart (All the fun of the fair, 3 October, page 34).

But apart from that, the article was entirely reliable.

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