TV station retracts gay ‘list of shame’ featuring Daniel Radcliffe
A TV station which published a gay “list of shame” featuring straight actors Daniel Radcliffe and Cameron Diaz has retracted the article and apologised for any offence caused.
The list was published on the Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) website, which provides news and entertainment to 150 million members of the Arabic-speaking world, under a section for a segment called ‘Scoop with Raya’, which is hosted by Raya Abirached, a host of ‘Arabs Got Talent’, but the station moved to distance the article from the show and its host.
It incorrectly named Radcliffe as a gay and Diaz as bisexual as well as claiming that Elton John wore a wedding dress when he married David Furnish.
In the apology and retraction, MBC noted that the list was “clearly not related to neither [sic] the presenter of the show.. nor the show itself,” and admitted that the junior editor who published it in the first place had failed to fact-check the story.
An MBC spokesperson told PinkNews that the article originally appeared on Yahoo. It is still available to read (in Arabic) here.
It is still unclear why the junior editor felt compelled to publish a “list of shame” naming gay celebrities, whether or not some were incorrectly named.
The full apology from MBC.net is available to read below:
One of the junior editors of the website published an article offending some of the big Hollywood celebrity names, which by no means was reflective of the sites [sic] editorial policy nor point of view, without prior verification of the facts of the story plagiarized from another official site, ultimately offending a list of popular celebrities loved and followed in the Arab world, namely: Ricky Martin, Cameron Diaz, Jodie Foster, Lindsay Lohan, Ellen DeGeneres, Elton John, Neil Patrick Harris, and Daniel Radcliffe.
Regretfully, the editor in question had plagiarized the news off [sic] another Arabic website without factual verification of the article, therefore going against two of the major pillars of journalism: cross checking the validity of the news; and discrediting and not attributing the actual site from which the news was retrieved, causing a ripple effect of disciplinary action and investigative measures from the website’s end towards the employee in question, who is now on probation, and continues to investigate any other source that reflects the same with such irresponsible behavior.
Mbc.net apologizes from its readers and the named celebrities, for the article that was published earlier on the scoop section of the site www.mb.net/scoop, and that is clearly not related to neither [sic] the presenter of the show “Scoop with Raya”, Raya Abi Rached, nor the show itself.
