I happened to be reading an old issue of Private Eye (a friend subscribes and occasionally gives me some old copies) and came across this, discussing various misinformation regarding a recent crime that had been reported by a London tabloid columnist named Rod Liddle (no relation to the famous statistician, I assume):
Here is “what REALLY happened”, Liddle informed readers: “A drunken Polish bloke gets into an argument with a 15-year-old black kid. He pushes him and calls him ‘n****’. The kid responds with a single punch. The Polish man, Arek Jozwik, is floored and killed.” Not so: the youth who killed Jozwik with a single punch was white. But why worry about a fact? Almost a fortnight later, Liddle and the *Sun website have yet to correct it.
I did a quick search on the Sun website and did not find the article (I searched for Jozwik Liddle and found nothing, then I searched for Jozwik alone and found a bunch of articles, but nothing by Liddle), which suggests that they removed it rather than correcting it. But maybe it’s been corrected and I just don’t know where to look. In the meantime, I found an old link to Liddle’s article here, and here it is on the Internet archive.
This interested me because we’ve been hearing a lot about problems with trust in the news in the U.S., so it’s good to remember that other countries have it a lot worse. I get annoyed when David Brooks pushes fake statistics at New York Times readers and then never runs a correction, but that’s nothing compared to what they do across the pond.
P.S. Also in the same issue:
After it emerged that Evening Standard editor George Osborne had told friends he wants Theresa May “chopped up in bags in my freezer”, fellow politicians queued up to criticize his choice of words.
This one was bizarre because all of the criticism had to do with Osborne (formerly the second-most-powerful person in the U.K. government) using this language to refer to a woman. I guess England’s the kind of place where it’s ok for a leading politician to talk about chopping someone up, if that someone is a man?
Also the bit about the “bags in the freezer.” What’s up with these people? You’d think killing someone would be enough, but then you have to chop up the body just to make sure? And then that’s not enough, you have to keep the chopped up body in your freezer? That’s one creepy country, where a major politician could talk this way.