Do they just make this stuff up?
One upon a time tabloid newspapers lauded it over the masses, pumping out questionable facts unchallenged — and then came Twitter.
The latest example of this power shift came today when the Daily Express was forced to issue a humbling correction about a story it ran last month headlined ‘Look at the people who benefit from human rights law’.
The original piece, which appears to have been removed from the paper’s website, slammed the human rights information website RightsInfo founded earlier this year by One Crown Office Row barrister Adam Wagner.
But in poking fun at Wagner’s venture — which has drawn criticism elsewhere for being angled to appeal to establishment luvvies rather than normal people — the Express got its facts very badly wrong on wider human rights issues.
And Wagner’s pal, the solicitor and popular legal tweeter Shoaib Khan, got straight onto the paper’s bosses to tell them about this, no doubt ready to punish inaction with a Twitter protest.
A correction ensued in today’s paper. Here it is in full:
Following my complaint, @Daily_Express has today published this correction about an inaccurate human rights article: pic.twitter.com/71LAoF6Dc4
— Shoaib M Khan (@ShoaibMKhan) September 28, 2015
So, to summarise, the Express exaggerated the number of cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), hugely inflated the amount of compensation that the UK government was ordered to pay the ECHtR and got its facts about an Algerian immigrant and claimant Cat Reilly very wrong indeed.