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June 17, 2013

Deja vu all over again as The Guardian regrets errors in its reporting of Sun Tulisa sting

By Axegrinder

Reverse ferret time at The Guardian and, not for the first time, over a story involving The Sun.

In a blog post last week, Roy Greenslade dissected how The Sun Sunday managed to get the previous weekend’s splash – a sting operation on pop star Tulisa Contostavlos.

Extrapolating from a Sunday People story about a hoax on the much-maligned singer, Greenslade suggested that it was The Sun wot dun it – further claiming that the paper had splashed out on a private jet and attaching a price tag of up to £150,000 on the scoop.

But a look at that same blog post today shows no sign of such conjecture, nor of the description of the story as “an essentially worthless piece of journalism”, nor even of the following bon mots directed at its author Mazher Mahmood: “The whole sordid business, as it so often does when Mahmood is involved, stinks.”

The Guardian updated the blog post on Friday, outlining some of the changes (though not all) in a footnote.

“We regret these errors,” it concluded(see linked stories below for background on previous aggro between The Sun and The Guardian).

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