HOW modern journalism works: a source says something and the story takes on a life of its own. The Daily Mirror told us that sportsman and mod Bradley Wiggins was turning his hand to music, “teaming with Paul Weller and Bruce Foxton on new single.” The story was based on a single “source”:
“It’s all incredibly exciting and has been in the pipeline for some time. Everything has finally been signed off though, and a date set for mid-February.”
The song would be nothing if not interesting. Only, the story is nonsense. The Paul Weller Twitter feed states:
But if one anonymous source is enough to fill a page in the Mirror, it;s enough to fill a page in the Mail, which says the song will be a “new version of Window Shopping”;
Such are the facts…
‘No truth whatsoever’.
Mike Dawes at MailOnline, the Huffington Post and the Express all repeated the story based solely, it seems, on the Mirror’s anonymous source. There doesn’t appear to be have been any fact-checking by any of them – just some copy-and-pasting. The Express article was published after the Weller denial.
Five days on, all three articles remain live and uncorrected.
