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Friday 16 May 2008

We humbly apologise . . .

"We accept, without reservation, the conclusions of Ofcom and apologise to the programme makers for the damage and distress caused by our original press release."

Let's just read that again, just for the hell of it, displayed this time:

We accept, without reservation, the conclusions of Ofcom and apologise to the programme makers for the damage and distress caused by our original press release.

Fun, isn't it? That's the grovelling apology, now available on their website, from West Midlands Police, who wrongly accused Channel 4 of a bit of fancy editing in order to make a documentary more hateful towards Muslims. As you'll see from yesterday's Pink Triangle entry, "Let’s hear it for Channel 4", West Midlands Police's complaint against the makers of the documentary Undercover Mosque failed, but they left the offending press release on their website. So Channel 4 went for the jugular, resulting in a judgment that has meant a fine and the apology.

"[W]e were wrong to make these allegations," says the press release. Furthermore, the programme "had accurately represented the material it had gathered and dealt with the subject matter responsibly and in context".

The National Secular Society's now calling for a public inquiry into the role of West Midlans Police and the Crown Prosecution Service in the whole silly charade.

OK, just one more time:

We accept, without reservation, the conclusions of Ofcom and apologise to the programme makers for the damage and distress caused by our original press release.

On this one at least, the score is: common sense 1, PC brigade (pun only half intended) 0.

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