The Daily Mirror has been forced to issue a front-page correction after it misrepresented comments made by the former health secretary Jeremy Hunt during this year’s winter health crisis, wrongly implying the Conservative minister had refused to apologise to the public for the state of the NHS or show sympathy with overworked medical staff.
The newspaper used a front page in February to claim that Hunt had refused “to apologise for NHS inability to cope with the worst winter ever”, even though the question had not been put it him. Under the headline “You’re off your trolley”, the Mirror also said Hunt “had arrogantly told staff they ‘knew what they were signing up’ for” when they entered the profession.
The Department for Health complained to the press regulator Ipso that this constituted a substantial inaccuracy, on the basis that Hunt had also said he took “responsibility for everything that happens in the NHS” and apologised to patients for sub-standard care.
Hunt also qualified his comments about NHS staff expecting their work to be stressful by making it clear the situation was not sustainable and could not continue indefinitely.
The Mirror argued that it was valid to paraphrase Hunt’s comments, which were made in a broadcast interview with ITV, as arrogant but the Department for Health disagreed, turning down the Mirror’s offer of a clarification and demanding a front-page apology.
IPSO concluded the Mirror published “two significantly misleading statements” that were used as the basis for personal criticism of Hunt’s position, which constituted “a significant and prominent failure to take care not to publish distorted comments”. It ordered the front-page correction to run in Monday’s edition of the newspaper and required it to be placed in a prominent position on the Mirror’s website for 24 hours.
The regulator also made it clear, however, that all political comments would “inevitably be subject to close scrutiny and criticism” and emphasised that the Mirror was not obliged to apologise to Hunt, merely issue a statement saying it had misrepresented him.
IPSO, which regulates several of the biggest national newspapers, is increasingly willing to demand that substantial corrections to front-page stories should be flagged on a subsequent front page. Last Friday, it forced the Daily Mail to issue a similar correction after the newspaper wrongly claimed an Iraqi man who won compensation from the British government was an insurgent who had been caught with a bomb.
Hunt, who became foreign secretary earlier this month, may see the ruling as a welcome distraction after he was filmed in China accidentally stating that his Chinese wife was Japanese.
