Paula Murray/Dunblane update

Man, I need to really work on coming up with snappier blog titles. Anyway, just a quick update for anyone that came to my previous entry a day late and found they couldn't access the article I was wittering on about. That's because the article was removed yesterday, presumably in response to people unsurprisingly complaining to the PCC about the almost Kelvin MacKenzie-level survivor-baiting nonsense that Murray so artlessly crapped onto the page. If, like me, you have some kind of weird compulsion to read things you know in advance are going to make you want to wallop your own balls with a meat tenderiser, then you can still read cached versions of it like this one (thanks to Adam Bienkov for that link).

It'll be interesting to see what happens, although my hunch is that if any kind of apology is forthcoming it will be of the weaselly 'sorry for any offence caused' variety, and buried somewhere deep in the paper. Though it wouldn't surprise me if they merely apologised privately to the families and never mentioned it again. As an example of the kind of resolution you can expect from the PCC, here's a broadly similar complaint about Express insensitivity from a member of the public:

Complaint:

Mr Tim Fuller complained that the newspaper had insensitively and inaccurately reported the death of a family member, who had, apparently, sadly taken her own life. He was concerned that the newspaper had wrongly suggested that her death was connected to an “internet cult” and had included personal information about her and her partner.

Resolution:

The complaint was resolved when the newspaper apologised to him, removed the article from its website and circulated a legal warning to its journalists on the issue of reporting suicide.

If the Express do make a better fist of apologising than the standard 'remove the article from the internet and it's all alright', I'll gladly tip my hat to them though. (UPDATE 14/04/09: meant to update this earlier, but in the interests of full disclosure there was indeed an apology of sorts, covered here)