Accusing somebody of rape when he did nothing is a very serious matter. It destroys that person's life forever!
If you don't put the correction up high enough, people will miss that it was a false accusation, and a "urban legend"/meme type thing will form, that sticks to that person forever anyway.

It is exactly why slander / character assassination is a crime, and the original reason such actions were criminalized. (Until they got abused to censor everybody and everything.)

Corrections just aren't enough when a person is accused of a crime. Even resigning, plenty of people will believe that Alistair did it and that shadowy right-wing operatives coerced him into resigning.

The only right answer is not to fuck it up in the first place.

Or, instead of The Guardian, you can read all about it on the BBC website [bbc.co.uk].

Yes, you read that right - the BBC are reporting on this and not pulling too many punches. In fact, one of the last straws for Entwistle was a difficult grilling by a BBC interview on their flagship radio news program. That goes to show why, although some heads need to be cracked together over this screw-up, the BBC is something worth keeping.

Couple of other points:

Actually, they didn't name him, just described the accsued as a "prominent Thatcher-era conservative politician" but in the process they leant a lot of credibility to internet tittle-tattle which did name him.

Its worth putting this in the context of the BBC's current predicament - they've been accused of dropping an investigation into sexual abuse by the formerly-much-loved celeb, now deceased and discredited Jimmy Saville. Of course while, with hindsight, that investigation was right on the money, had their evidence not panned out then there would have been an uproar, so close to the star's death. This looks awfully like an attempt to over-compensate, and not spike a story that should have been spiked. However, that this should happen when the BBC management knew that they were already under scrutiny does not look good.

I don't think Lord McAlpine will suffer any enduring harm to his reputation. The allegations were very quickly proven false.

But hopefully this will be enough to bring this sad chapter to an end. What had started with accusations against Savile (who is dead and thus beyond all prosecution) has turned into a hysteria-driven witch hunt, where the police are essentially sidelined in favour of investigative "journalists" looking to make a name themselves by catching the ever bigger fish.

McAlpine will likely sue and most certainly win and there can be a more rational approach to investigating pedophile accusations than wagging a list in the British Prime Minister's face on television.

How do you plan to ensure that nobody, in a planet with about 7Billion people, that nobody fucks it up?

The only way is for false accusations not to matter. That means no vigilantes; it means the law deals seriously with people who are dangerous paedophiles (so people have confidence that they don't need to intervene themselves) and it means people who cause harm to the falsely accused, for example by firing them from work, should be forced to fully and completely compensate them for that harm.

The guy was a kid at the time of the police investigation. You don't think it would be reasonable to show him a picture of Mc Alpine again and just check "is this really the guy?" before making the accusation?

This is basically the same accusation as the Saville stuff. Failing to follow through with proper journalistic professionalism because the BBC staff has been cut and messed about with by the past several UK regimes. Cameron, Brown and Blair should all resign with Entwistle.

I think the parent is saying that because the BBC was so heavily condemned for burying the story about Jimmy Savile being a predatory sex offender, it had no choice but air accusations against McAlpine. I agree that's why the BBC ran the story, but failing to uphold journalistic standards in one direction is not a reason to suspend those standards in the other.

Gawd I hate putting those two words next to each other... if FOX News had a director resign after every piece of bad journalism, you could watch the line of new directors walking continuously through the building without ever stopping. Of course this would require journalistic integrity... so FOX will never have to worry abut this problem.

The geek tends to believe in the technocratic notion that his specialist skills place him above the law and other social norms.

It's useful corrective to be reminded now and again that it just ain't so,

Much of the rest of the UK media, especially the bits owned by Murdoch, hate them passionately.

The BBC Newsnight programme ran this, and the Director General had no idea they were running it. Ordinarily, he might get away with it if it were an isolated thing. However Newsnight was recently found to have cut an investigation into Jimmy Savile, a well-known TV/radio personality who turned out to be a serial child abuser. The investigation was cut for "editorial" reasons last year (soon after he died) and the suspicion was that it would allow them to run sacharine eulogies for him at Christmas. Finally, the accusations only got aired this year by another channel, and it looks like he abused hundreds of kids over decades, including in BBC dressing rooms.
So Newsnight was under a lot of scrutiny, and the Director General ought to have been watching it like a hawk.

However he admitted (to a BBC journalist in a very tough radio interview - let's see any other news organization allow its own journalists to bury their editor-in-chief) that he hadn't known what the programme was going to say about Lord McAlpine, and he didn't have an answer to the accusation that he was "asleep at the wheel".

So yeah, he mucked up by not being sharp enough. The BBC itself doesn't look good as it seems to have (thus far) allowed the people who made the "editorial decision" to cut the Savile investigation to continue in their roles. I suspect they will go eventually, once the independent inquiries have run their course.

However the one thing it has got right, and *no other* news organization would ever get right, is to have one part of it criticize another. There is no way Sky News would ever allow one of its journalists to have a go at the head of Sky TV in the manner of this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9768000/9768406.stm [bbc.co.uk]

And yet all it takes for me to be content with paying my licence fee is about five minutes watching any other major news channel, from the UK or otherwise. The BBC isn't perfect, but it's so far above the average there's no meaningful comparison, and IMHO it is still somewhat ahead of even the decent alternatives overall.

One of the most interesting things about the BBC is the remarkably neutral way their news programmes report on stories involving themselves or their own people. George Entwistle was being interviewed on their regular breakfast programme -- not a show you would normally associate with hard-nosed journalism and heavy questioning of interviewees -- just a few hours before he threw in the towel, and even there the hosts weren't giving him a bye just because he was (at that moment) their own editor-in-chief. On many of the news networks, I imagine the kind of blunt challenges those presenters made would have been career-threatening moves.

Yes the liberal conspiracy exists. Sane and rational people collude to exclude batshit crazy nutjob ideologies from public discourse. Boo-fucking-hoo...nobody will to take my wingnut talk seriously. Reality has a liberal bias!

Speaking of bat-shit-crazy.

The press (who have no vested interest in bringing down the BBC oh no) have been putting the boot in for years so it must be true! The Commie BBC with their homo pinko agenda must be destroyed and replaced with the serious journalism and honest reporting that gave us the hacking of a murdered teenager's voicemail.

Works every time.

Really? An investigation never reaches an inaccurate conclusion?

That's... quite a reality you live in.

How do you plan to ensure that nobody, in a planet with about 7Billion people, that nobody fucks it up?

The first thing to do is to fire the person who fucked up AND the person above them who fucked up. That's at a minimum. This does several things 1) it eliminates one person who fucked up, so they won't do it again. 2) It eliminates another person who fucked up by not paying attention. 3) It sends a solid message to the people who are still there - fuck up, or let someone fuck up on your watch and you're done. Anyone further up the chain is optional on top of this, but IMHO you have to start with the people who did it and those who should have known.

Bah! man at the top resigns while shitheads who "investigated", wrote, and reported the story are all sitting there reporting on the resignation.