A weekly editor yesterday accused the Labour Party of banning its staff from filming an Ed Miliband speech before later retracting the claim.
Ben Green, editor of the Worksop Guardian, took to Twitter to make the initial accusation after the Labour leader’s visit to the Nottinghamshire town yesterday morning.
But the Labour Party denied any such confrontation had taken place and Ben later retracted his comments.
He also deleted a series of Tweets, pictured below, in which he had likened modern-day politicians to “stage managed robots.”
Mr Miliband had been visiting a B&Q warehouse in Worksop with Bassetlaw MP John Mann yesterday morning.
Ben posted a further Tweet which read: “Just spoken to @Ed_Milliband spokesman who tells me that no one was stopped filming the Labour leader on his visit to Worksop today.”
A Labour Party spokesman said: “No one was stopped from filming at today’s event. We are always happy for our public events to be filmed.”
Last night the incident was being put down to “crossed wires.” Ben has declined to comment further.
Sign up for our free daily email bulletin
Follow HTFP on Twitter
Got a story? Email the Editor at
Yet another fine example of why the news industry needs to get on with producing decent newspapers and stop its obsession with Twitter etc. If the editor had done the normal journalistic checks of accuracy he wouldn’t have ended up looking as daft as he does.
And just how many of his readers would have actually read those Tweets – probably no more than a handful. The majority of his Twitter readers will have been political advisors and other news organisations!
Report this comment
Ohhh dear. The slow, gradual decline of journalism expressed in all its glory via Twitter. I remember when people said to me ‘never trust what is on the internet and always check the facts when reading Wikipedia’ and so on. Twitter is often just a couple of paragraphs of waffle, almost akin to the Teletext of old!
Report this comment
Embarrassing public errors like this make real fools of editors and as long as money isn’t invested in the training of news teams this kind of thing will happen time and time again. As more and more decent journalists move over to PR the newsroom is left being inadequately propped up. I’m sure this editor is just doing his best.
Report this comment
In other words. Young reporter messed up or didn’t have the stones to ask for the footage so sold the boss a fib.
Report this comment
I would be interested to know what went on behind the scenes and how exactly there were ‘crossed wires’. Did a reporter / photographer on the scene misinterpret what they were told by one of Miliband’s aides, for example? Or did an over-enthusiastic aide stop them from filming when they weren’t supposed to, then deny it afterwards? It’s hard to know what to make of this as I feel we’re only seeing part of the story.
Report this comment