The blog admitted they "screwed up".
A right wing website called Guido Fawkes has admitted “we screwed up” after it claimed that Labour leadership contender Rebecca Long-Bailey was married to a multi-millionaire.
The website falsely claimed that Long-Bailey’s husband Steve was the multi-millionaire director of a chemical company.
Long-Bailey laughed off the anonymously-authored claim saying “clearly I married the wrong Steve Bailey…tripped up there didn’t I?”
Guido Fawkes later apologised to her on Twitter, saying: “We got the wrong Bailey. Two Steve Baileys working in the chemical industry. A lesson to us to never follow up leads from Wikipedia.”
The website does not list its authors for individual articles, so it’s not clear who made the mistake, but its two reporters are Tom Harwood and Christian Calgie. Harwood appears regularly on BBC politics programmes like Question Time.
Last week, Guido Fawkes labelled Nazi-saluting football supporters “Italian tourists” and said a Jewish Labour MP was wrong to say they should “get their heads kicked in”.
The article later changed “Italian tourists” to “Italian football fans” but did not take the story down and did not make a note that the correction had been made – as is conventional in the media.
8 Responses to “Right-wing blog forced to apologise after relying on Wikipedia to smear Rebecca Long-Bailey”
Patrick Newman
Maybe they will get it wrong about someone with the money to sue the shit out of them! I am intensely relaxed about partners of Labour M.P.’s having a bit of money provided they don’t avoid their taxpaying responsibilities. Anyone who is an owner-occupier of a house in London like Jeremy Corbyn is probably a paper millionaire. It seems that the gutter press expects socialists to be on subsistence income if they are not to be pilloried as hypocrites!
Jeremy Corbyn
I am also married to a multi-millionairess coffee plantation owner who sells £10 bags of coffee having paid only £1 for ALL the labour involved.
Do as I say, comrades, not as I do.
James McGibbon
Nothing wrong with a millionaire socialist if you win the lottery or your rich daddy gave it to you. Exploiting workers and supporting the Capitalist Mafia EU does not make you a socialist.
steve
The corporate media’s view of socialists:
If they’re rich, they’re hypocrites.
If they’re poor, they’re envious.
Alan Bond
Why is anyone surprised by lies of this nature. It’s what fascists do and they are ably abetted by the right wing media, which is most of it. Try looking for truth in the ‘Wapping Liar’, The ‘Daily Mugger or the slow express and you won’t find it about the Labour party !