Sunday 15 February 2009

The Mail shortens Jade Goody's life

I subscribe to lots of RSS feeds via Google Reader. It allows me to monitor lots of different sites in one place without endlessly going round-and-round from site to site.

One site I follow is that of the Daily Mail's showbiz section. This is partly because I'm a celebrity-whore, but also because there's often material there I can mock. It's good blog-fodder.

Anyway, one feature of the Mail's feed is that it highlights how they are always fiddling with their articles. I don't know the technicalities, but whenever they edit an article, it gets reposted to the feed.

Today's feed contained this headline, posted at 1.56pm:
'I've lived in front of cameras. And maybe I'll die in front of them': Jade Goody faces terror of having only months to live

Then 36 minutes later, this was changed to read:
'I've lived in front of cameras. And maybe I'll die in front of them': Jade Goody faces terror of having only weeks to live

So what's the story here? All the reporting I saw yesterday said that her life expectancy was being measured in 'months'. Has the prognosis changed, or could it be that someone over at the Mail thought that somehow, having only months to live just wasn't quite dramatic enough?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

From the sounds of things, "months" sounded rather optimistic. I think it's more than likely that the incorrect information was sent to the press the first time round, either due to optimistic PR or simply the doctor trying to be tactful and her misinterpreting it.