Poor Daily Mail Journalism – Why Social Media Works
One of our team has just been interviewed by the Daily Mail and the end result is one of the worst examples of poor Daily Mail journalism that I’ve ever seen. I also took a call from one of the other interviewees last night that said they had been fundamentally mis-represented by the reporters, Diana Appleyard and Sadie Nicholas.
The problem is actually not one of simple mis-representation but one where the reporters have written blatants lies to enhance their angle. The point of this piece was that women are choosing adoption. In my colleague’s case, the catalyst was medical not aesthetic and simply put, the journalists have twisted the facts to meet the goals of the piece. Taking info out of context is one thing but presenting people as having said the polar extreme of what their views actually are is, in any other sense, simply a lie.
What’s interesting about this is that The Daily Mail does have an fairly active message board – with 187 coments to the piece at the time of writing. The 188th (this morning) was from my colleague – so we’ll be watching closely to see whether The Mail does subscribe to the values and ethics of social media by allowing her to put across her points, which fundamentally contradict those put out by the journalists in the piece, or not.
Clearly comments are moderated for abuse – which is only fair and proper – but let’s hope the Mail is at least fairminded enough to allow a wronged party to put the facts straight in response to it’s own bad journalism.
**UPDATE**
The Mail has just taken the electronic version of the piece down…
PeteGoold.com 
Has a similar experience when Sadio Nicholas wrote a piece about me in the Daily Mail, she exaggerated and told some downright lies. The article then appears on a website called Highbeam even more complete lies….how are they allowed to do this?