Words Dept.: entry

Since saying sorry has become really rather fashionable in the last week or so, perhaps it would be appropriate for the Sun to apologise to its readers for its misleading coverage of the story of 13-year-old Alfie Patten. Following a court ruling, it can now be reported that Alfie never fathered a child, despite specific claims to the contrary by the UK’s favourite halfwits’ comic.

Today the Sun appears to be vigorously backtracking on its original “exclusive” by denying it ever reported that Alfie was the baby’s dad.

Its story today says:

Our story about Alfie’s claim that he had fathered baby Maisie sparked shockwaves around the world.

In other words, it seems to be saying, the Sun’s story wasn’t “13-year-old boy fathers child” (completely wrong). It was “13-year-old boy claims to have fathered child” (perfectly true).

This is despite the following statements, which appeared in a bylined report in the red-top on 13 February:

Baby-faced Alfie, who is 13 but looks more like eight, became a father four days ago…

and

Maisie was conceived after Chantelle and Alfie - just 12 at the time - had a single night of unprotected sex.

Both of which are completely untrue.

As I said previously, on being told this kid had fathered a baby, the paper’s gut reaction should have been: “Who says?” It would have been possible to verify the claim that Alfie was the father before reporting what obviously had the potential to be totally false.

Instead, the Sun splashed with an expedient lie. This allowed it to boost website traffic and then go to town with a load of moralistic finger-wagging over the issue of “broken Britain” like this, by Sun columnist Jane Moore:

What a damning indictment on Britain’s hugely expensive sex education programme in schools.

When boys as emotionally and physically child-like as Alfie start creating babies, it’s the thin end of a wedge that will break the existing cracks in society so wide open that there’ll be no hope of repair.

All of which, it now turns out, was based on a steaming heap of bullshit.

In the event, all that’s actually happened is that two 15-year-olds are parents to a newborn baby. Which isn’t much of a story, really.

So. Apology?