The Sun buries its Chris Jefferies apology – another nail in the coffin of self regulation
Eight papers have paid substantial damages to Chris Jefferies, the landlord of Joanna Yeates, for libellous suggestions related to her murder.
But for some reason The Sun website's own search engine won't show the apology when you search for his name ...
The Sun's apology to Chris, er Christopher, Jefferies
That's a screenshot of the apology. As you can see, he's changed from being Chris Jefferies (which is what they called him in the stories about him) to Christopher Jefferies, which doesn't exactly help.
But if you use the Sun website's own search engine to search for either Chris or Christopher Jefferies, you can't see the apology in the results.
Here's the results for a search for Chris Jefferies, organised into date order.
No apology to be seen ...
And here is the one result for a search for Christopher Jefferies.
No apology to be seen ...
No sign of the apology in either case ...
What hope is there for self-regulation if newspapers can't include in their own site's search results the apologies they have made about "false suggestions he might have killed his former tenant Joanna Yeates, acted inappropriately towards pupils in the past, invaded his tenants' privacy, was associated with a convicted paedophile and might have been involved in an unsolved murder in 1974"?
Great work. But did you look in the wordsearch puzzle?
Hey Malcolm,
this is only a thought, but as their search is 'enhanced by Google', I'd expect that:
- The Sun has no direct control over what is and isn't listed
- it's just a matter of time until the new page makes it into the results
It'd be interesting to see how soon (if ever) the apology gets added to the results pages - and like I said, it's only an observation, it may never show up at all!
It's been in google's web and news results for a while now. I don't think either google or the sun's own CMS are that slow ...