Culture Secretary John Whittingdale Caught in Prostitution Scandal

[Denzil_DC]

41. The Guardian's Media Monkey column wades in:

Daily Mail and Telegraph's attacks on Byline go awry

Some of the attempts to dig up dirt on Byline, the crowdfunded journalism site that first published details of John Whittingdale’s private life, appear to have gone slightly awry.

First there was a Daily Mail claim that campaign group Hacked Off directly funded the organisation, which had to be clarified on Wednesday morning.

And then later in the day the Telegraph quietly amended a line about Byline’s backers written by Andrew Gilligan which talked about “Jae-woong Lee, a South Korean billionaire who is the father of the site’s founder, Seung-yoon Lee”.

The problem was that, as Jae-woong Lee and Seung-yoon Lee pointed out on Twitter, they are not father and son.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/mediamonkeyblog/2016/apr/20/daily-mail-telegraph-byline-hacked-off

Byline has a more detailed rebuttal of the Gilligan hit-job:

Andrew Gilligan - Pants On Fire

The Telegraph has run a hatchet job on Byline Media and Hacked Off today. It is so poorly researched that it qualifies as an amateurish pack of lies - but not journalism.

It had to come: after all the hit jobs on website Byline Media and campaigning group Hacked Off last week, the Telegraph showed its hand, and its desperation, by summoning Andrew “Transcription Error” Gilligan to write a smear piece so amateurish in its research and construction that it has left those at both Byline and Hacked Off looking like extras in a Smash advert, rather than angrily consulting their lawyers (which may come later).

Zelo Street has asked both organisations to comment, and has been given feedback from senior and reliable sources at both. What follows exposes the sheer vacuousness and dishonesty of Andrew Gilligan - as well as the paper that publishes his work.

https://www.byline.com/column/20/article/989