Paper Monitor
10:04 UK time, Thursday, 11 March 2010
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
It's a one-paragraph snippet tucked away on page four of today's Daily Mail. Blink twice and you'll miss it. But it has grabbed the attention of Paper Monitor - and many others.
You see those three sentences are an apology. It's not something the Mail does very often. In fact, it could give even the most stubborn toddler a run for their money when it comes to refusing to say the "s" word.
The apology is over an article it ran yesterday by criminologist and child protection expert Mark Williams-Thomas. It was headlined: "I posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. What followed will sicken you."
The article comes after a earlier in the week, in which a paedophile raped and murdered a young teenager he'd met on the social networking site. Under the guise of a young girl, you can imagine what happened to Mr Williams-Thomas.
"Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me. I was deluged by strangers asking stomach-churning questions about my sexual experience. I was pressured to meet men with whom I'd never before communicated."
But it transpires that some of the facts in the story weren't quite right, in fact they were totally wrong. Mr Williams-Thomas used another social networking site for his "chat" - not Facebook. He says he told the paper about its mistake in the story, which was ghost written by a Mail journalist, but it didn't change it. (More detail about this can be found in the Rory Cellan-Jones blog).
When Facebook complained, the Mail corrected its , but not the printed version, which had already hit the newsagents. A day later, and now so obviously in the wrong, the paper still hasn't actually said the "s" word, just a lot of other guff.
"In an earlier version of this article, we wrongly stated that the criminologist had conducted an experiment into social networking sites by posing as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook with the result that he quickly attracted sexually motivated messages. In fact he had used a different social networking site for this exercise. We are happy to set the record straight."
If the Daily Mail were a toddler, it wouldn't be looking Facebook in the eye as it said the above and its mother would be telling it to "say it like you really mean it". But it's probably as close as most newspapers come to saying sorry.
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