The Press Complaints Commission has upheld a complaint against the Daily Mail for publishing the incorrect verdict in the Amanda Knox case. The Mail's website reported that Knox has lost her appeal against her conviction for murdering Meredith Kercher when, in fact, she had been successful. The article, published on 3 October, was live for 90 seconds, after which it was replaced with an article reporting the correct outcome. In addition to the main thrust of the complaint - which concerned accuracy - the complainants were also concerned about additional elements of the reporting. These included quotes attributed to the prosecutors apparently reacting to the guilty verdict, and the description of the reaction in the courtroom to the news, stating that Knox "sank into her chair sobbing uncontrollably while her family and friends hugged each other in tears".. It further stated that the family of Meredith Kercher "remained expressionless, staring straight ahead, glancing over just once at the distraught Knox family". The newspaper apologised for the mistake. It said that it was standard practice in such high-profile cases for two alternative stories plus supporting quotes to be prepared in advance, and cited the fact that other news outlets had also initially published the wrong verdict due to some confusion in the courtroom.
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Amanda Knox criticises ‘guilty’ fake news during trial
Amanda Knox arrives in Milan, Italy on June 13th, the first time she's been back to the country since she was acquitted for the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher. In , Twitter was just coming online, with 5, Tweets per day. Facebook was still in its data-harvesting infancy, with less than million users. But the Amanda Knox story tapped into something previously inchoate, a vein of irrationality, rage, misogyny, pettiness and paranoia that — as the world has since come to understand — has bubbled along in the human species, unshared and unspoken, until it was enabled and amplified by the World Wide Web. Fact-Checking the Aretha Franklin Biopic. Local police, racing to solve the case as students fled the university town, made a mess of the crime scene and committed forensic blunders in the lab, among other mistakes. The local magistrate, afflicted with indigenous superstitions, proclaimed the murder a Satanic rite, setting off a global media feeding frenzy — and something else that, in hindsight, was just the beginning. The Amanda Knox phenomenon marked the first time a bizarre cult of credulity emerged online, with tens of thousands of people energetically subscribing to the most heinous possible scenario, while refusing to accept more reasonable alternatives. A now-familiar scenario played out: Vicious social media swarms led by trolls using online pseudonyms.
The Daily Mail has been forced to issue a fresh apology after being censured by the Press Complaints Commission for publishing a fictitious story on the Amanda Knox trial online. The fake story stated that Knox had lost an appeal against her conviction for murdering British student Meredith Kercher — when in fact she had won. Acknowledging its errors the Mail claimed that it was standard practice to prepare two alternative stories in high profile cases to be prepared in advance and courtroom confusion had led to the wrong angle being picked.
