England’s Sunday Mirror newspaper was forced to recall and trash an early run after they identified the wrong man as a convicted rapist who won £7m in the lottery last year. The paper’s management went to great lengths to collect or buy back any issues that had already hit the streets, and ended up trashing an estimated 150,000 copies. The paper also contacted broadcast outlets to ensure they didn’t use the photos on air. We’ll see whether it was all enough to save them from getting hit with a libel suit by the poor chap that was branded a rapist.
Here’s what The Guardian had to say about the story:
In the scoop-hungry world
of the Sunday tabloids, a picture of Iorworth Hoare – better known in
the trade as the "Lotto rapist" – inspecting £500,000 yachts in a
seaside resort, seemed a momentous coup.For
the Sunday Mirror, locked as always in the perennial dogfight with the
News of The World, the picture of the serial offender and £7m lottery
winner also presented a considerable commercial opportunity."On the loose" screamed the front-page story, which was tagged – inevitably in the circumstances – "World Exclusive."
The only difficulty was
the fact that the man displayed was not the "Lotto rapist" at all, a
conclusion only reached by the newspaper’s executives after they had
printed between 140,000 and 150,000 copies of yesterday’s edition. They
do not know who the misidentified man is, only that he is not who they
supposed him to be.Amid
frantic scenes at the paper’s Canary Wharf headquarters, decisions were
made to stop the presses and to halt the distribution of copies already
printed. They were to be pulped.However,
by the time the corrective action was taken, thousands of copies had
already been sent to central London, Tyneside, Teesside and areas of
the Midlands.A
huge effort was launched to retrieve them, including the dispatch of
motorbike riders detailed to take back or buy back offending copies
from vendors in the capital. Newsagents in other areas were told to
take the flawed issue off sale. Executives say around 95% of them were
retrieved.Officials
were particularly anxious to prevent the paper being distributed in the
area close where the offending photograph was taken, recognising that
the hapless figure in the front page photograph would probably object
to being described as one of Britain’s "most evil" criminals.They were also concerned that locals, seeing the picture, might turn vigilante and attack him…
