Wednesday 19 March 2008

All Apologies...

More on the Express apologies to the McCanns (see next item):
Guardian media critic Roy Greenslade has examples of offending headlines, useful now that the stories have been removed from the papers' web sites.
Greenslade also unloads with both barrels, writing that "A rogue proprietor and his rogue editors have done further damage to the credibility of our trade."
Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics did a long deconstruction of media coverage of the case in January. Today he wonders whether the Express and Star case could mark the moment when the "tide turns against recent tabloid excesses."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This complaint about the way the press treat those who are accused (and these days suspected) of criminal offences is not new. You heard me mention this quotation, and I apologise for repeating it: "When once such a charge is published, it is extremely difficult to take off the effect of it by any counter statement, and it may possibly meet the eye of thousands who may never hear that the party accused was ultimately proved innocent or guilty." It dates from 1824.

Richard

Suburban Correspondent said...

This isn't a comment on the subject at hand, but I can't find your e-mail address.

Do me a favor, and look at the Washington Post website, and then look at the New York Times website. NYT has a much cleaner, easier-to-use site, and I peruse it daily for interesting articles. I only go to the Post website if I absolutely have to, and it is very difficult to find what I am looking for on it. Even when there is a specific article in the print edition that I am looking for online so that I can e-mail it, it often takes me 2 or 3 tries to get to the right page.

Please tell whoever may have some say in these matters that the Post really needs to invest in some webpage designers who know their stuff. And they need to test out webpage prototypes on readers. The current page is way too busy, some of the print is way too small, and the advertisements and text are all in the wrong places. Copy the Times if you have to, but fix it.

Anonymous said...

What Richard says is so true and is being borne out in the current US Presidential campaigns....throw some mud and duck, then complain loudly when a similar attack is made on you.

I also tend to agree with suburban correspondent, and don't get me started on the Post's newpaper boxes where you can sometimes slip the coins in and sometimes get a paper.