Last month I invited Tim Ireland to take questions from students at City University about his experiences in SEO and related issues. One particular section, when he spoke of the role of networks in the legend of Paul Revere, and the significance of the Daily Mail’s false Amanda Knox report, struck me as particularly interesting, so I’m republishing it here.
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Both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror today – among with several others in the US (including the New York Post, which credits the image to AP) and other countries – published an image purporting to be that of the dead Osama Bin Laden. It clearly wasn’t. Any journalist with a drop of cynicism would have questioned the source
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The PCC has made its first rulings on a complaint over newspapers republishing a person’s tweets. The background to this is the publication in The Daily Mail and the Independent on Sunday of tweets by civil servant Sarah Baskerville. Adrian Short sums up the stories pretty nicely: “We could be forgiven for thinking you’re trying to make the news rather
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Juliet Shaw writes in a guest post on No Sleep ‘Til Brooklands about her experience of fighting The Daily Mail through the courts after they published an apparently fabricated article (her dissection of the article and its fictions is both painstaking and painful). There is no happy ending, but there are almost 100 comments. And once again you are struck
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Plagiarism is an interesting game.
You can either rewrite the piece, find a bit more information, leave other bits out, and – if you’re the Daily Mail – reduce the reading age by a year or three.
Or you can acknowledge that the story came from somewhere else, and give a hat-tip for a nugget, or a small fee for an article.
Or you can try and ride both horses and end up sitting on your backside in the middle.
So, we have Exhibit A, from Dizzy Thinks:
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a dedicated civil servant working on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012? Not particular shocking really, but there is an oddity.
According to an FoI release, one of the roles of this civil servant is the development of equalities impact assessment for the Queen’s celebratory bash. Why does a celebration for one person need an equalities impact assessment?
Mind you, as an eagle-eyed reader put to to me. Perhaps it’s because she’s (a) a woman, (b) a pensioner, (c) dependent on state benefits, and (d) married to an immigrant?
and Exhibit B, from the Daily Mail:
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has a dedicated civil servant working on the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012. One of the roles of the civil servant is the development of an ‘equalities impact assessment’. Why does a Âcelebration for one person need an equalities impact assessment? Is it because she’s a woman, a pensioner, relies on the state for handouts — and is married to a foreigner?
The two are nearly the same, and it’s only an item in a Diary column, for heaven’s sake. A tip would cost about twenty pounds or a gift voucher, and an acknowledgement would cost nothing.
(Hat-tip: Dizzy).
[Update: re-edited]
News organisations across the country will today be running stories based on a report by Big Brother Watch into the amount spent on CCTV surveillance by local authorities (PDF). The treatment of this report is a lesson in how journalists approach figures, and why context is more important than raw figures. BBC Radio WM, for example, led this morning on
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The superinjunction obtained by England Captain John Terry was overturned on Friday – and the case raises some interesting issues.
The Sun is running a despicable campaign against Gordon Brown. But I’ve analysed the comments on its website – and readers disagree with its stance by a ratio of more than 3 to 2 (on top of which, there are now accusations that the Sun is censoring pro-Brown comments). The paper has exploited the grief of Jacqui Janes over her
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Was the campaign against Jan Moir that crashed the PCC website “heavily orchestrated”? Jan Moir herself thinks so. Was it “organised”? The deputy editor of the Telegraph said it was. If this was the case, who was organising this? “The big gay who runs the internet“? Stephen Fry? And what do they mean by organised? Let’s start with 3 definitions: Functioning within a formal structure,
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When is an online comment defamatory?
Rob Minto looks at two recent cases that leave the field of libel online as confusing as ever. For several years, newspapers, bloggers and other online publishers have been waiting for a landmark case to clarify defamation online. The unanswered questions have been along the lines of: who’s responsible – the author or publisher (or even ISP)? What jurisdiction will
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regulation, law and ethics, twitter • Tags: colin elsbury, comments, daily mail, defamation, eddie talbot, jane clift, justice sharp, libel, twitter • Comment feed RSS 2.0 - Read this post