They say that now
The Sun newspaper says it regrets publishing a Jeremy Clarkson column about the Duchess of Sussex and is “sincerely sorry”.
What was its first clue?
I still don’t see why the editor or editors didn’t read it the first time and say “Ffs he can’t say that” and simply take it out. Even if you think Markle is scheming and manipulative and fake, you don’t get to say poisonous degrading things about her in a much-read tabloid.
Neil Wallis, media commentator and former editor at the Sun and News Of The World, told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme Clarkson was failed by the editorial team.
“The bottom line of this is this is a dreadful failure of editing,” he said.
It is. I was an editor for The Philosophers’ Magazine for several years and I can promise you a sentence like that would have made my hair stand on end. If it had been between quotation marks as an example of hate speech that would be a different matter, but Clarkson wasn’t offering a paradigm, he was venting his very own loathing and contempt. Any competent editor would take it out.
He added: “At at least three points it seems to me there were opportunities for people in senior responsible positions for putting their hand up and saying ‘we can’t publish this, this is just wrong’. The job of being an editor is to sometimes protect a columnist from themselves.”
It always is. An editor protects a columnist from typos, bad grammar, misspellings, rambling, incoherence, clumsy wording, verbosity – the list is endless.
I doubt the sincerity of the Sun’s apology.
Condensed version: The Sun is sincerely sorry it received over 20,000 complaints about Clarkson.
Now that I can believe.
Of course it is true that multiple editors had the opportunity and the responsibility to remove such offensive language,
The problem, in this case, is that they probably all agree with what was said and the current political and social climate in the UK and elsewhere has lulled them into a sense that such views are shared by the majority and are perfectly acceptable.
The fact that so many people complained has likely come as a great shock to them.
Clarkson may have been failed by editors, but first and foremost he was failed by himself. It was his choice to say those things, not the editor’s. The failure to take them out failed the readership and the paper, but not Clarkson.
I do not wish to give any pass to the editors, because it’s like Colin Daniels #2 said, they probably agree. But the fault of the words themselves is Clarkson’s alone. The editors can be blamed for not doing their job; Clarkson must be blamed for expressing those thoughts in a public source.
I’m having trouble finding either the original Clarkson column or an extract of the beginning that is being criticized here. Could someone kindly provide me a link? It appears that Clarkson requested that the column be taken down, and the Sun has complied.
This is the first post I did on it, it has a screenshot of what he said.
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2022/no-tell-us-what-you-really-think/