Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Oops we did it again

Another apology from the sub-Standard, aka The London Daily Mail.

You'll remember the pisspoor Capital-based non-news newspaper was among the papers who shelled out to Robert Murat for wrongly accusing him of involvement over the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, despite the complete and utter lack of evidence.

You'll also remember that they had to say sorry and cough up a bit of cash to David Gest after they wrongly suggested he had contracted a sexually-transmitted infection, despite the complete and utter lack of evidence.

Today it's a slightly different story. They have had to apologise to the Duke of Edinburgh for suggesting he has prostate cancer, despite the complete and utter lack of evidence.

In its apology, the paper said the duke was "not suffering from any such condition".
"We unreservedly apologise both to him and to his family for making this distressing allegation and for breaching his privacy," it added

What is irritating about the high-horse behaviour of the press following the Max Moseley case is that they pretended that investigative journalism was under threat from the ruling. Bollocks - journalism is under threat from telling lies about people based on no evidence whatsoever when the story doesn't benefit the public in any way at all other than to satisfy an intrusive curiosity about other people's private lives. That's the real problem, when you've got journalists looking for tittle-tattle and meaningless gossip rather than conducting real investigations.

The interesting aspect for me is that a good percentage of men of the Duke of Edinburgh's age *will* have prostate cancer. Many men live with it for years through their 70s and 80s.

So another possibility strikes me: was this just a calculated gamble?

One thing's for sure: it keeps happening to the Standard, doesn't it? And they're stories that aren't difficult not to run if you really don't have the evidence. They're either very unfortunate, or very shit. Or there's a third option: they simply write off X complete bollocks stories every year as 'these things happen'. When you make as much money as they do, I guess you could afford to do that.

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