The billionaire-owned Murdoch newspaper, The Times, has been forced to make an urgent correction after falsely accusing Jeremy Corbyn of voting against the Falklands war – a claim made despite the Labour leader not actually becoming an MP until more than an entire year after the issue was voted on in Parliament.
In an article which once again attempted to criticise the Labour leader’s stance on National Security, war and nuclear weapons, the online version of the Murdoch newspaper directly claimed that as an MP, Jeremy Corbyn voted against military intervention in the Falklands.
However, the authors of the article, Rachel Sylvester and Alice Thomson, appear to have done absolutely no research whatsoever into the completely baseless claim beforehand.
In fact, the Falklands War began in April 1982 and ended just two months later in June of the same year, whilst Jeremy Corbyn was only first elected to his Islington North constituency almost a full year after the war had finished, in June 1983.
Despite the gravity of their error, today’s Times Corrections and Clarifications page contained a typically understated correction, simply acknowledging that:
“We wrongly stated in early editions (News, Nov 6) that as an MP Jeremy Corbyn voted against military intervention in the Falklands. Mr Corbyn was first elected to parliament the year after the Falklands War.”
The correction has also been added to the bottom of the original article.
However, as with the vast majority of tiny and entirely un-promoted corrections made by mainstream media outlets, it is extremely unlikely that anyone who read the original version will ever actually see the correction and know the truth.
The Times is regulated by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) – who, as their name suggests, claim to be independent, but whose board actually contains numerous senior employees of the very media outlets they are supposed to be regulating.
IPSO have become an extremely controversial organisation in recent years, with many complaints about seemingly serious breaches of their code going completely unpunished.
In 2016, IPSO cleared The S*n after they published a deeply repulsive article by racist rent-a-gob Katie Hopkins which was widely compared to Nazi propaganda and contained a line which directly compared immigrants to cockroaches.
The supposedly independent press authority again cleared The S*n after an article by Trevor Kavanagh – who just so happened to be on the board of IPSO at the time – again replicated Nazi propaganda in a deeply racist rant about what he called “The Muslim Problem“.
However, IPSO did force The Times to make a front page correction after it made numerous false claims in an article about a “white Christian child” who was supposedly left distraught after being fostered by a Muslim couple.
However, The Times have never apologised for publishing the above lies, and it is extremely unlikely they will be forced to give any form of apology for publishing an outright lie about the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn either.
