A UK newspaper that gets a fact wrong cannot tack an update onto the online article and move on. The Independent Press Standards Organisation, IPSO, can order exactly where the fix runs, in print and online, and how loudly it says the paper got it wrong.
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That power comes from the Editors’ Code of Practice, which IPSO enforces. Clause 1 requires a significant inaccuracy to be corrected “promptly and with due prominence”, with an apology where one is due. In cases involving IPSO, the code says, due prominence is whatever the regulator requires.
What the correction has to say
A correction names the error and states the fact in its place. When The Sun ran a column claiming two out of three Calais migrants seeking asylum as children were lying about their age, the real figure was 636 out of 3,472 asylum claims, 18.3 per cent. The paper’s Corrections & Clarifications column, printed on page two three days after the column ran, spelled out the mix-up. The two-thirds figure referred to migrants who had gone through an age assessment after a dispute, not to migrants in general.
The wording has to match the actual mistake. IPSO’s committee found the columnist had misread a BBC report and taken a figure about age-assessment cases to describe all asylum claims, a reading he later accepted was wrong.
Where it has to sit
Placement is not left to the paper either. The Aberdeen Press & Journal wrongly named a campaign group as “Clan Donald” rather than the unconnected Facebook group “Clan Donald Worldwide”. It offered to print its correction on page 5 or 6 of the paper. The original article had run on page 3.
IPSO’s committee rejected that. It ruled the correction had to appear “in full, on page 3 or further forward”, matching or beating the prominence of the error itself. The committee noted that pages 5 and 6 were not an established corrections column.
The online article itself
A correction that only appears in a separate column, while the original article online stays unchanged, is not enough either. In the Sun case, an internal oversight meant the print correction was never added online when it first ran. The paper added it, to both the article and its online Clarifications and Corrections section, only after the complainant pointed out the gap.
IPSO’s investigation went further than that. The Sun had at first left the columnist’s own words untouched, arguing that the appended correction already made the true figure clear. Once IPSO started investigating, the paper also amended the inaccurate figure inside the article’s subheading, its picture caption, and the body text itself.
That sequence shows the two layers a correction has to cover. One is the standalone notice: a line in a corrections column, dated and specific, stating what was wrong and what is right. The other is the article people actually land on from a search result or a social share, which carries the same error until someone edits it directly.
When IPSO makes the paper say so
IPSO can also require a paper to state, on the correction itself, that it ran because of an IPSO ruling rather than the paper’s own initiative. In the Press & Journal case, IPSO told the paper to add a line to both the print and online corrections making clear that IPSO’s ruling was the reason they appeared.
The heavier sanction
The Sun’s breach carried a sanction of publishing IPSO’s adjudication, the ruling document itself, rather than a shorter corrections-column note.
IPSO’s first set of rulings, issued in December 2014, came out of nearly 3,000 complaints received since the regulator started work three months earlier, many resolved directly between the paper and the person complaining.
