The Telegraph has refused to tell press regulator IPSO how an article about a made-up banker supposedly impacted by school fee increases came to be published.
The article, headlined “We earn £345k, but soaring private school fees mean we can’t go on five holidays”, was published and quickly withdrawn in June last year.
Despite speculation that the article had been written using AI, Press Gazette confirmed it had been written by a real journalist and was based on a phone interview set up by a PR working for financial planning firm Saltus whose school fees research was referenced in the story.
The journalist appears to have been deceived by the man on the phone who gave a fake name.
Freelance journalist Ian Fraser raised concerns about the piece and the fact he could find no trace of bankers named Al and Alexandra Moy, the subjects of the piece, anywhere else online.
He also noted the pictures of a family used in the article were stock images taken in 2012 and 2014.
Fraser raised a complaint with IPSO which has now been upheld on accuracy grounds.
The Telegraph declined to provide an account to IPSO of how the article came to be published, citing confidentiality obligations. The publication said it did not need to provide further information for the investigation given it had already published an apology.
IPSO said: “Publications are expected to demonstrate what steps they have taken not to publish inaccurate information – this shows compliance with the Editors’ Code, and a commitment to high editorial standards.” The regulator said there had been a “serious failure” to take care over the story.
Telegraph ‘lost confidence’ in story over image concerns
The Telegraph said it had become clear soon after publication that there was an issue with the images, according to the IPSO ruling.
The Telegraph carried out an internal investigation after which “the team lost confidence in the article as a whole and immediately removed it from online”.
It blamed the issues on a failure to make pre-publication checks.
In response to Fraser, The Telegraph said: “We have established that contrary to the impression given, the images shown were stock photographs and not pictures of the family the subject [sic] of the article. We have also not been able to independently verify the details published.
“We are aware of speculation that the story was created using Artificial Intelligence; this is not the case. We apologise to you and have publicly apologised to all our readers for having published an article that did not meet the standards we and you expect from The Telegraph. We have reviewed our procedures to seek to avoid such an error ever happening again.”
IPSO said: “This was an unusual case where a publication had undertaken internal inquiries in response to complaints and concluded that it could not verify any of the details of a published article.
“This called into question the accuracy of the entire article, which had been presented as an illustrative example of the real-world impact of a controversial government policy.”
The Telegraph said it advised the journalists involved in the article’s publication that “significant mistakes” had been made.
It said in-person sessions were held with members of the relevant section “to reinforce not only what had gone wrong but the lessons that had to be learned and a reminder of best practice in respect of case studies”.
This best practice was also shared with other sections of the newsroom that produce case study-led stories.
Fraser had also queried the reporting that the family had dropped a gardener who increased his costs from £230 a year to £245, suggesting that it was implausible they would have “baulked” at paying an extra £15.
The Telegraph said this had come about through a sub-editing error and did not match what the man told the journalist on the phone.
This meant IPSO said the article was “inaccurate on at least two points: the gardener’s pay, which the publication had attributed to a subediting error, and the presentation of stock images as images of the family featured in the story”.
IPSO said The Telegraph’s original apology was “appropriate given the extent of the publication’s inability to stand by the story” but ordered an adjudication to be published on the Telegraph homepage because it had not sufficiently set out the extent of the inaccuracies.
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