The Guardian's Roy Greenslade provides a case study for why the press should take special care to correct online material. He recounts the tale of a totally false story published by the Sunday Telegraph in 2003 given new life thanks to the lack of an effective online corrections policy. He writes (with all the relevant links):
...the Sunday Telegraph published an utterly false tale claiming that several councils "across Britain" had ordered schools to stop serving to hot cross buns at Easter so as not to offend children of non-Christian faiths. In fact, no local authority had done anything of the sort, as I reported at the time. Most had never served hot cross buns in the first place. It was a figment of the reporters' imaginations and the Sunday Telegraph eventually carried an apology. But this was never appended to its website story, and the result has led to the story being recycled some four years later.
Last week the east London borough of Tower Hamlets - one of the original councils named by the Telegraph - found it necessary to deny that same bun-banning story all over again. It issued a statement to the East London Advertiser "rubbishing" renewed claims that had appeared in a Caribbean online newspaper Cayman Net News dated March 24, 2007. That article, referring to a "blanket bun ban" and to "English bun persecution", is based entirely on the false Sunday Telegraph report.
So the failure of the Sunday Telegraph to put a note on its website archive - as it promised at the time to do - has led to the pernicious lie being resurrected. Isn't it about time that it sorted this out? Or will Tower Hamlets, and five other councils, be called on to deny these claims every Easter for the rest of the century?
