Do great white lies matter?
By Andrew Grant-Adamson • Aug 9th, 2007 • Category: Internet, NewspapersSo the picture that seemed to confirm a great white shark off the Cornish coast at Newquay was a hoax. It was all part of the silly season gift that began when a man on holiday at St Ives filmed a shark, claimed to be a man-eating great white. The Sun made a lot of it and, with varying degrees of scepticism, so did the rest of the media.
The Guardian today gets a bite at the space-filling cherry by devoting a whole page to the revelation that the picture of a great white from Newquay, further up the coast, was actually taken off Cape Town, South Africa.
The revelation came from the Newquay Voice which had had interviewed the man who had provided the picture to their rival, the Newquay Guardian. Kevin Keeble said: “I took the picture while I was on a fishing trip in Cape Town and just sent it in as a joke. I didn’t expect anyone to be daft enough to take it seriously.”
The tourist industry is happy that the story (BBC) has put Cornwall on the map and newspapers have filled the open spaces of August newsprint. As a reporter I tend to shrug at such silly season stories on the grounds that they are entertaining, few people really believe them, and they do no harm.
But do they diminish trust? Turn the page in the Guardian and we learn in an interview with Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, that it would conduct research into the public’s expectations.
He says: “Do people have different expectations from a piece of fiction to the news or a documentary? I think they do. And what do you do in that grey area in the middle where you’ve got mockumentaries and fictionalised history and so on. What are the standards that should prevail there?”
Few newspapers would welcome being so publicly under the microscope as the BBC is from its own regulator.
Andrew Grant-Adamson is Andrew Grant-Adamson is a journalist who now teaches a new generation of writers, subs and editors at the University of Westminster.
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Posted 10 hours ago Do great white lies matter? So the picture that seemed to confirm a great white shark off the Cornish coast at Newquay was a hoax. It was all part of the silly season gift that began when a man on holiday at St Ives filmed a …
Silly season stories probably don’t matter because, as you say people recognise them for what they are.
I’m more concerned with the lack of scientific knowledge revealed in the corrections in yesterday’s Guardian regarding what happens to olive oil when heated and today’s that reveals a lack of understanding of how low energy bulbs work. Errors like these are harder to spot.
Not to mention the Lord Lucan nonsense in the Standard.
Do they diminish trust? Yes, of course, but such papers lost that long ago, IMHO. Nowadays, they’re merely par for the course.