Daily Mail lies

Backbiter

meester wrote: »

But the problem is you read it and it's never clear how much of it is exaggerated or completely made up.

I would be a lot more confident with what they print if they didn't so transparently set out to mislead.

There's misleading - by giving a particular slant to a story to fit their agenda, which all papers do to some degree - and there's blatant scaremongering and knowingly printing lies, which is the Mail's hallmark.

I came across this snippet the other week:

Two murders a day - nearly one in five - are committed by those on bail. Their victims have been betrayed by a Government that passed laws to send more people to jail, but wouldn't spend the money on new prisons.

That was in the paper's official comment page, here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...e-himself.html

Two murders a day committed by people on bail? That's over 700 a year. Which, they tell us, is nearly 20% of the total, which would be some 3,500 murders a year in the UK. I was shocked, as I never realised our murder rate was that high.

So I looked it up. And found the following:

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs08/hosb0308.pdf
Quote:
SUMMARY
• There were 757 deaths initially recorded as homicides in England and Wales based on cases
recorded by the police in 2006/07, a decrease of two per cent since 2005/06.

I wrote a reply on their webpage pointing out their error and requested that they correct it. Weeks later, the same page is still there, still printing the horrifying, but wildly inaccurate statistic, and still claiming that:

No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts?

So to compound their misinformation, they also censor any readers' comments they disagree with and fail to correct blatant falsehoods.

I am going to make a formal complaint against them.

The press complaints commission website states:

It is the responsibility of editors and publishers to apply the Code to editorial material in both printed and online versions of publications. They should take care to ensure it is observed rigorously by all editorial staff and external contributors, including non-journalists, in printed and online versions of publications.

1
Accuracy


i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.
ii) A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and - where appropriate - an apology published.

liquidlives

Good luck with your complaint, what you've described does seem rather dubious.