tomroyal.com

10.30am or so this morning, on the internets:

Which would be, if true, something of a scoop for the Daily Mail. So let's take a look at the article – here's the first few paras:

Which is great – the source is Mr Jobs himself. On Twitter. Except that, as anyone working in tech journalism should know, Steve Jobs doesn't have a verified Twitter account. It took all of 10 seconds to find the source -  this update:

There are many clues that @ceostevejobs is a parody account – not least the phrase "of course this is a parody account" in his biography. Apparently, though, nobody at the Mail bothered to check. I published a link on Twitter. People laughed and mocked. Sarcastic comments appeared on the article. Still it sat unchanged. A few hours later a colleague pointed out that it also contained a howling typo – that, too, sat uncorrected.

All in all, then, an astronomical fuckup that lead to an incorrect article being published. So where's the correction? There isn't one. Instead it took around four hours for the Mail's web team to notice – or perhaps to decide that the traffic they were getting no longer outweighed the potential embarrassment – and the page disappeared offline at around 2pm.

So there you have it: shoddy reporting, no fact checking, an incorrect news story sitting online for hours and no apology. At least, for once, it doesn't really matter that much.

This article on the Mail website is stupid enough (the "ice in eyes" thing comes from one teacher, who didn't even close her school, for example), but check out the top image (after the fifth paragraph if you click the above link, or direct link here).

Now, many Mail articles seem to be designed to direct the irate towards people that they can blame for the various perceived wrongs of society, while simultaneously providing a happy glow of smug moral certainty. So then, blame-fans, let's see what we have here: snow on the ground, and the weather's clearly freezing. Kid on the left: T-shirt with no sleeves. Kid on the right: appears to be hugging self for warmth. Hmm. And I'm supposed to blame the school, you say?

There's no attribution on the image and the quality is pretty poor, so I'm guessing this was sent to the Mail by a reader. Possibly one of the parents of the kids in question. I wonder if said reader actually got these kids to take their coats off just to pose a photo so they could send it off to a newspaper with a caption ("it's political correctness gone mad", etc)?

If that's the case, it strikes me as a pretty good example of irresponsible parenting. I wonder what the Mail's own pet moral guardians (including Parents Outloud, whose qualification for being relentlessly quoted appears to be a blogger page) would make of it.

Screaming capital letters in a statement from the usually sombre Bank of England? Really? The complete statement presumably read: "There's NOTHING we can do to stop prices rising!!!111!!!!!eleven OMGFGPONIES". Muppets.

Journalism 101 from the Daily Mail today. Here's the lede paragraph:

Children as young as four are set to be given compulsory sex education in primary school classes, it has been revealed.

So far, so straightforward. Kids will be given compulsory lessons about sex from the age of four. Second para:

They will be taught about the names of body parts and basic ideas about different relationships.

So it's not really the kind of sex education suggested in the lede at all, then, because the four year olds won't actually be taught about, you know, sex. In fact, reading on, it transpires that the classes are to be "sex and relationship education". Third para:

Government advisors claim that 'gradual education' from such a young age would help children not rush into sex when they are older.

But who are these "government advisors" – given that the lessons are "set to be" given, they are presumably commenting on some new policy? No. As the ninth paragraph reveals:

But the fpa (formerly the Family Planning Association), Brook and the Sex Education Forum are recommending the introduction of compulsory lessons.

So in fact this is a recommendation from three charities during a consultation, not government policy of any kind and therefore not something that's going to necessarily be implemented. This is drummed home in the (er, extremely prominent) 21st paragraph:

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families insisted that no final decision has been made by Ministers on the subject yet.

So the lessons aren't necessarily about sex, and they may yet not happen. All in all, a more accurate lede would be: Charities have recommended that the Government should introduce sex and relationship education into the national curriculum gradually from primary school onwards.

But then that sounds so, you know, reasonable.

This article from the Daily Mail is pretty funny in itself, but the photo that accompanies it is a work of genius. It's hard to work out quite what the Photoshop artist was aiming for, but it's fair to say that they failed. Spectacularly. Either that, or Anne Diamond (who is she, anyhow?) is actually a ghost who can SHOVE EVIL VIDEO GAMES INTO HER BODY AND ABSORB THE EVILNESS INSIDE THEM.