Observer withdraws eco terrorist scare article

I'm grateful to Calvin for letting me know that The Observer has now withdrawn an article ran ran a couple of weeks back reporting that the police fear a lone eco terrorist from Earth First! might launch some sort of atrocity.

I criticised it at the time and there were a numer of other complaints.

Now the paper's readers' editor has published an adjudication which concludes:

While the paper had no intention of suggesting that every activist was a potential terrorist, several climate campers wrote to protest. 'If a journalist is told by a single anonymous source that a movement of people has among it individuals who would take the lives of men, women and children in a terror attack, what standard of evidence does that journalist require? In this case: no evidence whatsoever. The claim itself was the story.'

We've been here before. Other newspapers reported on a predicted 'summer of hate' at climate camps that never materialised and the Press Complaints Commission found against the Evening Standard at climate campers were planning attacks at Heathrow.

Environmentalist Keith Metcalf explained that Earth First! supported direct action against property, but not against people. He believed that the debate around sustainable population size had been twisted to imply that environmentalists wished to kill people.

He also repeated the belief of several others that Nectu was briefing in this manner in order to make prosecutions easier and to boost its funding, which is at risk owing to the decline in animal rights campaigns. I can't verify that or the fears about mass murder because, despite repeated requests, Nectu won't respond. Accordingly, The Observer has decided to withdraw the story.

You can read it in full here.

Good: a swift result and no messing. Score one for the readers' editor.

But aren't there subs and news editors whose job it is catch such shoddy work in the first place?

In other news: Henry Porter's column for The Obs today is, shock, not about how we're all on the verge of becoming a Gulag. True, it's still about himself, but it's actually a nice little tale about the Baader Meinhof gang. Porter, as others have pointed out, is a bit of a bore - but what with this sudden ability to write an atricle on something new and the retraction above there's hope for my Sunday reading yet.