Tuesday, 18 October 2011

After three months, Mail corrects '£32 loaf of bread' story

In today's 'Clarifications and corrections' column, the Mail finally admits that the claims it (and others) published in July about the NHS spending £32 per loaf of gluten-free bread were not true.

The Mail says:

An article on 19 July reported, in common with other newspapers, that the NHS paid £32.27 per loaf of gluten-free bread for patients with coeliac disease.

In fact, this was the price for an average prescription of several loaves; the price per loaf was around £2.82.

The original stories were shown to be rubbish within a day of publication. The Sun corrected it a month ago. So why has it taken the Mail three months (in total) to put it right? And after all that time, why haven't they apologised for getting it so badly wrong?
at

4 comments:

  1. Anonymous18 October 2011 at 02:16

    "And after all that time, why haven't they apologised for getting it so badly wrong?"

    I know you're kidding, right? Perhaps we should have a word with the PCC... that'll stop 'em!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Stuart18 October 2011 at 13:16

    To be fair, they've got many years of corrections to catch up on

    ReplyDelete
  3. Crispin Fisher18 October 2011 at 13:33

    I see that the Mail tries to play down the significance of the mistake blame by pointing out that other papers also made the same mistake. But isn't this just admission that it was another piece of churnalism where several papers picked up a story from an agency and copied and pasted the story without checking out if the story was true?

    ReplyDelete
  4. P. Stable19 October 2011 at 03:18

    There still hasn't been an apology from the Conservative AM (their shadow health minister in Wales, no less) who put out the misleading figures in a press release.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment.

Comments are moderated - generally to filter out spam and comments wishing death on people - but other messages will be approved as quickly as possible.