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I'm no fan of the Daily Mail in particular or their political leanings in general, but I don't think you're being fair here. It was live for 90 whole seconds and you wrote almost 400 words about how it's the worst thing ever? I agree that they should use Lorem Ipsum style filler text until they have real quotes, but preparing two versions of stories is extremely common. Most news outlets have a stack of "in case of death" stories on file for every possible celebrity or public figure. They even wrote one in case the Apollo 1 astronauts died.

"IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER": https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events...

2 comments

The issue isn't that they wrote two stories. The issue isn't that people may have been deceived by the wrong story being up for a few seconds.

The issue is that people have accused them of completely fabricating quotes for decades, and this was conclusive proof of the practice because the quotes in it could never have been said. This would be if the in case of moon disaster speech included a statement from the widow of one of the astronauts saying it was all worth it for science.

How is it not fair? This episode shows that any quotes in a Daily Mail story are probably completely fabricated, and that you can't trust anything in there to be the truth and not complete fiction.

> that you can't trust anything in there to be the truth and not complete fiction

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I'd say the same about literally any news outlet on the planet, though.

I completely disagree: lots of other news outlets have not ruined their reputation by printing outright falsehoods intentionally. There's a huge difference between some bias (which is completely unavoidable, everything is "biased" because someone has to choose what to print and what not to), and fabricating total lies.

Lots of other news outlets have not ruined their reputation by _getting caught_ printing outright falsehoods intentionally. Trust no one.