MailOnline churns press release, uses CE

Yesterday, the Leveson Inquiry team held a public seminar on the 'competitive pressures on the press and the impact on journalism'.

At this event, Mail on Sunday editor Peter Wright said:

"You can never start from the assumption that something is wrong...You never send a reporter out to go and prove something, you send them out to examine if something is true. You very often start with a gut feeling about a certain event about which you only have partial knowledge and the job of the reporter is to find out what really is going on."

This is the editor of the newspaper that, over the last two weeks, has repeatedly claimed that the BBC has 'dropped', 'jettisoned' and 'replaced' BC/AD with BCE/CE, despite the fact that isn't true and the BBC told his reporter it wasn't true.

It seems the job of his reporter was to go and find what was really going on, but then the paper decided to publish the assumption/gut feeling anyway.

And that myth still refuses to die. On 5 October, the Mail's Simon Caldwell reported on 'a front page editorial in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s official newspaper':

"The BBC has limited itself to changing only the description, rather than the computation of time, but in doing so, it cannot be denied that it has made a hypocritical gesture...an act of enormous foolishness."

So the Mail on Sunday writes a bogus attack on the BBC, and both it and the Mail keep the lie going by pretending it's true, and by reporting on the reaction of people who believe their stories.

Caldwell then writes:

The new guidance from the BBC asserts that the abbreviations for Before Christ and Anno Domini (the Year of the Lord) infringed its protocols on impartiality.

It instructs employees to instead replace them with the non-religious phrases BCE and BC – Before Common Era and Common Era.

This is clearly not true, given what the BBC has said about it being up to indivduals to choose - a statement relegated to the end of the article, after Caldwell repeats all the criticisms made by people who think the terms have indeed been 'dropped'.

But what's this?

Angry Mob points out that in an article published under the 'Daily Mail Reporter' byline last night, there's this sentence:

It had been up on MailOnline for hours, but the subs acted within 30 minutes of Kevin's post being published. And, not for the first time this week, they acted a little too fast:

In the rush to hide their hypocrisy, they mistakenly changed CE to BC. Seven minutes later, they changed it again:

So how did this happen? As Michael King pointed out, the article was a lazy cut-and-paste job from this press release from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. They said:

A thousand years ago, a brilliant beacon of light blazed in the sky, shining brightly enough to be seen even in daytime for almost a month. Native American and Chinese observers recorded the eye-catching event. We now know that they witnessed an exploding star, which left behind a gaseous remnant known as the Crab Nebula.

The same object that dazzled skygazers in 1054 C.E. continues to dazzle astronomers today by pumping out radiation at higher energies than anyone expected.

And the original MailOnline article said:

A thousand years ago, a brilliant beacon of light blazed in the sky, shining brightly enough to be seen even in daytime for almost a month.

Native American and Chinese observers recorded the eye-catching event.

What they were witnessing was an exploding star, which left behind a gaseous remnant known as the Crab Nebula.

The same object that dazzled skygazers in 1054 C.E. continues to fascinate astronomers today by pumping out radiation at higher energies than anyone expected.

Unsurprisingly, analysis from Churnalism.com shows that 96% of the MailOnline article is straight from the press release.

(Huge hat-tips to Kevin, Tim Miller and others)

Not front pages news (cont.) or how an imaginary dog can't eat an earring

Back, again, to the Mail on Sunday's front page:


In a post yesterday, this blog suggested that a spaniel swallowing a piece of jewellery isn't really a front page news story.

And that's even more true when it's completely made up.

Here's the headline from the online version:


Hack Kate Nicholl goes on to repeat lengthy quotes from a conveniently anonymous 'friend' about how Prince William gave girlfriend Kate Middleton some pearl earrings, which were then eaten by her spaniel. And to add an eye-catching bit of detail:

when the earrings finally emerged, she realised that there was no rescuing them, they were so badly damaged and chewed up.

Prince William's girlfriend looking through her dog's poo for an earring? It sounds a bit like the Prime Minister throwing a tangerine into a laminating machine. And, like the fruit-chucking hoax, it's been picked up unquestioningly by others, including David Harrison in the Telegraph (surprise!) and several media outlets in America.

There's just one slight problem.

There is no:

beloved black cocker spaniel

called Otto.

Because Kate Middleton doesn't have a dog.

The Express' Royal Reporter Richard Palmer tweeted this:


Which has been confirmed to me by a spokesman from Clarence House.

How did Nicholl come to write this rubbish? As a journalist, she should have contacted Clarence House or some other official sources to check the story. If she didn't, that's unbelievably sloppy. And if she did, and was told there was no such dog, but ran the story anyway, that's unbelievably shoddy.

As for the Mail on Sunday, their lead about Samantha Cameron voting Labour was quickly and comprehensively denied and now their other front page 'news' story about a dog eating jewellery has fallen apart because the dog doesn't exist.

Editor Peter Wright and Editor-in-Chief Paul Dacre: you must be so proud.

Not front page news

Today's Mail on Sunday is a very good example of what not to put on the front of your newspaper:


Ignoring the cheap watch giveaway, we'll start at the top of the page, which is, ironically, also the bottom of the barrel.

Piers Morgan. Talking about celebrities. Urgh.

Morgan and inanity go together like 'Viglen' and 'dodgy share-tipping'. The only surprise is he didn't put himself as the number one celebrity who 'matters most'.

Instead, he chose Simon Cowell, which has absolutely nothing to do with Cowell being Morgan's boss on Britain's Got Talent.

Morgan says Cowell:

constantly takes risks.

Really? He came to most people's attention with Pop Idol, based on the already 'successful' format of Popstars. Pop Idol was an ITV 'talent' show where hopefuls performed in front a panel of judges and gradually got eliminated based on a public vote.

He then did The X Factor, an ITV 'talent' show where hopefuls performed in front a panel of judges and gradually got eliminated based on a public vote.

And then he took a huge 'risk' with Britain's Got Talent, an ITV 'talent' show where hopefuls performed in front a panel of judges and gradually got eliminated based on a public vote.

And that's not even mentioning his involvement in American Idol and America's Got Talent.

Morgan and Cowell's fellow Britain's Got Talent judge Amanda Holden turns up in 24th place, while X Factor tear-factory Cheryl Cole is 3rd.

It's almost as if Morgan is just trying to impress his famous friends and show how terribly important he is - if you can possibly imagine him doing such a thing.

His definition of 'celebrity' for the purpose of this list seems to be anyone who is British and famous. You would be hard pushed to class Sir Michael Caine, Sir David Attenborough and Jeremy Paxman as 'celebrities'.

He includes Attenborough at number 96. So according to Morgan, Sir David 'matters' less than Coleen Rooney (67th), JLS (59th), James Corden (41st), Susan Boyle (37th) and Jordan (28th), and only matters slightly more than Heather Mills, who he puts in at 100 because she's:

brilliantly talentless.

It is an absolutely missable read.

The main story on Mail on Sunday's front page isn't much better. David Cameron's wife 'might' have voted Labour in the past and 'might' do again this year, it says, rather incredibly. It's based on a claim made by Shadow Culture Spokesman Ed Vaizey in an upcoming Andrew Rawnsley documentary about David Cameron.

As a front page news story, it's thin gruel. And it doesn't say much for the Mail on Sunday. Either they put this on the front page without properly investigating the claim. Or they had three fairly firm denials, and decided to go ahead with it anyway.

Whichever is true, it reflects poorly on Editor Peter Wright and Editor-in-Chief Paul Dacre.

The online version contains Samantha's denial:

‘I did not vote for Tony Blair in 1997 and I have never voted Labour.’

And then Conservative Central Office's statement that as Samantha had taken five weeks off work in 1997 to campaign for the Tories, it's highly unlikely she would have then voted Labour.

And there was Vaizey himself:

'I haven’t a clue whether she voted for Blair and I would be very surprised if she did. She married David in June 1996, so of course she voted for him in 1997...I don’t think Sam ever voted for Blair.'

Of course, they all would say that, wouldn't they? But it doesn't really seem very likely and certainly doesn't seem worth splashing all over the front page of your paper.

The same is true of the other story the Mail on Sunday decided was more important than anything else going on in the world today. What is it?

Dog ate my pearl earring.

Yes, really.

Remember how the Mail newspapers never once put the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Haiti on their front page?

But a spaniel swallows a piece of jewellery?

Now that is important...

[Update: the above has been corrected, based on the comments. I'm glad to say my knowledge of crappy reality shows isn't that good.]