August

The silly season arrives, the papers fill their pages with nonsense, and Street of Shame fills its columns with nonsense about the papers filing their pages with nonsense. From Eye 1191:

Outraged at being hoodwinked by the publicity for ITV’s Malcolm and Barbara documentary which erroneously suggested it featured the last moments of a man dying from Alzheimers, the Sun delivered a damning verdict in its editorial column. “The film-maker Paul Watson had the gall last week to attack ‘greedy’ producers of OTHER shows found to be fakes. But the hype around HIS programme is a big lie too… Heads have already rolled over this crisis of trust in British television. More may have to go now to rid the networks of an arrogance that results in the humble viewer being treated with contempt.”

So how did the Sun react to its own crisis of trust, when Kevin Keeble, whose photograph of a great white shark had been splashed all over the paper on 1 August beneath the headline “Just when you thought it was safe…”, admitted that he had actually taken the snap in South Africa, not off the coast of Cornwall as the paper claimed? In contrast to previous days, which had featured headlines like “tourists flock to see great white”, “I saw monster”, “Sun Fins out there” and “Jaws just 40ft from a beach”, the paper breathed not a single word on the matter.