This development did not receive much coverage. There were three sentences in the Sun on page 21, for example, and just a little more in the Daily Mirror on page 20. In the Daily Express itself you might easily have failed to spot the apology that was part of the settlement, as the two paragraphs in the top corner of page five were a little lost beside the bold headline blaring out across the rest of the spread: "Let the jobless lag lofts, says Brown". The Tapas Seven victory, it seems, was treated as a minor footnote to a burned-out story; few people were likely to be interested.Well, they ought to be interested, because the McCann case was the greatest scandal in our news media in at least a decade - an outrage far worse than the Andrew Gilligan "sexed-up dossier" affair of 2003 - and those responsible are now slinking away almost unpunished. They are escaping, moreover, by the most shameful of means. The editors and proprietors of the papers responsible for the great balloon of speculative nonsense that was the McCann story had the power to kill off discussion of what went wrong in the press, and they used it. When their balloon burst, they simply began pretending it had never existed.
Not one editor and, so far as I know, not one reporter has lost his or her job or even faced formal reprimand as a result of the McCann coverage. There has been no serious inquest in the industry and no organised attempt to establish what went wrong, while no measures have been taken to prevent a repetition. Where there have been consequences, as with the Tapas Seven, they have come from outside and been reported to the public with the most grudging economy.
This is a remarkable evasion of responsibility by an industry which is the first to boast of its own importance to a healthy democracy, and it is all the more unpalatable when you consider the standards this same industry expects of others.
Source: New Statesman
