How SMH hid being hoaxed by Matt Moran
You’d think the Sydney Morning Herald’s online edition hadn’t been hoaxed by the Matt Moran story at all.
If you look at it today, their story about the fake video, bylined to Georgina Robinson, begins:
“Move over Gordon Ramsay. No, make that Christian Bale.
“It turns out ARIA co-owner Matt Moran is as good a foul-mouthed actor as he is a chef.
“PR company Liquid Ideas confirmed the celebrity chef agreed to fake an explosive on-set tantrum to promote an anti-food wastage campaign.”
Which is not how it originally read. Happily, having a suspicious mind, Dr Mumbo took a copy in case anybody attempted to rewrite history. The original intro read:
“Celebrity Sydney chef Matt Moran has proved he can rival his British counterpart in the foul-mouthed anger stakes.
“Moran, co-owner of one of Sydney’s top restaurants, Aria, has been caught on film throwing an explosive tantrum at a food stylist who threw away a dish the chef had just prepared.”
Further down in the new version of the copy, the story now claims: “The video attracted immediate speculation about its authenticity.” But not so immediate that it made the paper question its authenticity of course.
The headline has also since been changed, from “Aria on an F string: Masterchef Matt Moran’s food waste meltdown” to “Aria on an F string: Why Matt Moran really boiled over”.
And the URL for the original version of the story – http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/aria-on-an-f-string-masterchef-matt-morans-food-waste-meltdown-20110510-1egme.html now redirects to the new version.
The original version of the story is not in the SMH’s archive.
It’s almost like the paper was never hoaxed at all.
Which is lucky, because that would be embarrassing.
It’s kind of like the time sister paper The Age published movie critic Jim Schembri’s review of ‘Scream 4’, in which he spoiled the killer’s identity in the first sentence, then tried to conceal his error. Great coverage of that here.
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What does “alosot” in the second last line mean?
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Hi CT – ‘almost’, typo now corrected.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
The Age online got taken in by the ‘bum-cam’ hoax too and did some swift re-editing. Wish I’d screen-grabbed at the time.
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It’s a fair point — but where do you draw the line in online journalism? Most stories on the home pages of major news sites are constantly evolving and chopped and changed. Errors do happen – but more often than not, stories simply move on and need to change. This is a normal part of the online process because a traditional sub-editing production line is of course not possible. So we are constantly working on and revising stories… Article history cd help but then we’d be publishing many outdated versions of a story – this wd lead to a confusing mess especially when you take SEO into account.
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Hi David,
For what it’s worth, my own policy is to label a rapidly evolving story with “More follows shortly” at the end, as a signal that it is going to undergo a rewrite or be expanded.
If we make significant changes, I’ll often flag them up via a strike through of the original text, or acknowledge it in the comment thread.
Agreed that with slight evolutions of stories it could be a technical nightmare, but there really should be a means of being transparent with the reader when you’ve got it badly wrong.
The Guardian’s policy of publishing revision history is a good form of transparency.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Gah I *hate* when they do that. Pass it onto Mediawatch!
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No wonder the reader comments at the end of the story didn’t make sense. They were from the original version, not the ‘updated’ version
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@ Tim Bennett, thanks for the link re Schembri’s Scream 4 review fiasco. I hadn’t actually read that timeline, simply as I tire of Crikey’s relentless cheap shots at the mainstream media so don’t read them too often. But that was a very good piece.
Apologies to stray a little off topic here, but what was also really interesting about that link is that it reveals it was a sub from Pagemasters who picked up the error in the original copy for the Scream 4 review. As much as I think it’s cheap and shortsighted of Fairfax to outsource their subbing to Pagemasters, the sad truth is that would have gotten past most of the office-based subs both at Fairfax and News Ltd these days. For most newspaper journos and writers, there is no real safety net in the subbing process any longer. In fact that is where most of the mistakes creep in. So kudos to that Pagemasters sub for spotting an error, even if the pretentious Schembri didn’t have the class to acknowledge the fact.
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This wasn’t evolution of a story by Fairfax, it was a rewrite of history.
Fairfax got caught out and thought the video was real, they have covered this up.
They should have acknowledge that they had a “big pic” on the front page of the site saying it was real and that they got caught out.
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