Daily Express fined for printing garbage

The Daily Express group has been ordered to pay £375,000 to seven friends of the McCann family, whose daughter Madeleine went missing in Portugal in May 2007 and has not been seen since, for printing untrue statements about them. The papers, including the Daily Express itself, the Sunday Express and Daily Star, claimed that the Portuguese police had identified them as suspects and suggested that they had covered up facts and misled the authorities. In March, the papers printed a front-page apology to Madeleine McCann’s parents for printing similar stories about them.

The BBC are calling the payout huge; the fact is that, although it may be substantial to the recipients (even divided up between the seven of them, as the reports seem to suggest), is a drip in the ocean compared to the Spew’s turnover – it is probably the sort of thing their insurance would cover and their premiums will go up next year; that will hurt (a bit). No doubt if the victims of the libel had been rich and famous, the Express would have had to pay them more. I think that papers which make their money this way should face crippling sanctions, including the suspension of their circulation, including when they print sensational stories whipping up public hostility to Muslims, Gypsies or any other minority.