Star-suckers

THE DAILY Star had to apologise yesterday after publishing a story which claimed that Rockstar Games was planning to call their latest release "Grand Theft Auto Rothbury".

The Star also paid "substantial damages" to the games company which has donated the money to charity, a generous act and the total antithesis of the newspaper's grubby attempts at journalism.

My earlier critique of the coverage of the Raoul Moat manhunt focused mainly on the broadcasting arm of the media.

But it forgot about the tendency of the national written press to go one worse in the lack of professionalism stakes - and this story in the Star comfortably accomplishes that.

In the apology, the Star states: "We made no attempt to check the accuracy of the story before publication and did not contact Rockstar Games prior to publishing the story.

"We also did not question why a best selling and critically acclaimed fictional games series would choose to base one of their most popular games on this horrifying real crime event."

The level of care - or lack of it - is absolutely ridiculous from a publication which still purports to be a national newspaper even though it looks more like a comic strip.

It places major questions marks over the extent of the fact-checking in any story in the tabloids, a matter which has already been investigated in the Chris Atkins documentary, Starsuckers.

In Starsuckers, the documentary production team planted a series of made-up stories about celebrities by calling up the 'Got A Story' telephone numbers which can be seen in all the tabloids.

It was a brave project which eventually landed the makers an email from Max Clifford's preferred law firm Carter-Ruck threatening them with an injunction.

But the papers, with plenty of white space to fill, had already lapped up the 'tip-offs' when a simple fact-check on each occasion would have proven the story was a fabrication.

And so, reports emerged of Avril Lavigne falling asleep in a London nightclub, of Amy Winehouse's hair catching fire, of Guy Ritchie receiving a black-eye after drinking too much at a restaurant, and of Girls Aloud's Sarah Harding taking an interest in astronomy.

Of course, while the Starsuckers documentary was a valid expose, it simply reaffirmed much of the justified public cynicism about so-called 'celeb news'.

The problem with the Star's GTA Rothbury story is that it cannot just be cast off as filler on the celeb pages.

The newspaper clearly believed that this was a proper news story - they even went as far as "soliciting critical comments from a grieving family member".

But not as far as actually checking for any truth behind the story.

The banner on the Star's website claims that it is "Simply the Best". In reality, this was simply not good enough.