Dunstable on Sunday was saved from making the same potentially expensive mistake as The Sun by a last minute phone call, writes Jean Morgan.
The Sun apologised this week for printing a photograph supplied by an agency last Saturday of a man called David Gazley whom it had mistakenly identified as Christopher Harris, a convicted serial rapist.
DoS was about to do the same. Harris was from the Dunstable area and a judge had banned him from speaking to children for the rest of his life. The DoS front page was already proofed and almost on its way to the printers when a call from the Norwich agency, which supplied the picture, warned that it was not the right man.
Editor Aylia Fox said: “The agency is normally very reliable. We were about to go to press and we were publishing the picture over four columns on the front page. We had to pull it pronto and put in a boring picture of Dunstable leisure centre where some of the man’s offences had taken place. We had an incredibly lucky escape.
“The Sun can probably afford to make a mistake like that but if it had hit us, a little local paper, goodness knows what would have happened.”
Jean Morgan
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