The BBC has apologised to the Daily Mail and its editor Paul Dacre after a series of news bulletins wrongly stated the newspaper’s journalists were implicated in the phone-hacking scandal.

The 1am, 2am and 3am news bulletins aired yesterday on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service carried reports about Dacre’s announcement that he will step down as editor later this year which linked the newspaper to the phone-hacking scandal in 2011.

News Group Newspapers, publishers of the News of the World and the Sun, and Mirror Group Newspapers have paid out to victims of phone-hacking.