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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
How a fabricated quote and a British tabloid brought the "George Harrison Is Dying" story to life.
Aug 3, 2001 | Last week, a British tabloid, the Mail on Sunday, published a story in which former Beatles producer Sir George Martin was quoted as saying in reference to George Harrison, "He knows that he is going to die soon." The story used the unequivocal statement twice. And it was quickly picked up by news agencies, Web sites, radio and television around the world.
It wasn't until the following Monday afternoon that an angry Harrison was able to issue a statement denying the story. Sir George's representative also condemned it as untrue and said that Sir George never made the remark.
The tale of how the specious story came to be is considerably more interesting than the story itself. As it turns out, the quote was fabricated, apparently by an editor at a news agency, and inserted into a story sold to the Mail on Sunday, one of England's nine national Sunday newspapers. A reporter at the Mail duplicated the fabricated quote as though it had been uttered twice and added other misleading language, as well as numerous dubious quotes from anonymous "sources." This morning, the editor, who had worked at the news agency for nearly two years, abruptly resigned, but the management at the Mail on Sunday continues to stand by its story -- despite the fact that it is incontestably false and violates the most rudimentary rules of journalism.
The Mail on Sunday, like its sister paper the Daily Mail, occupies the middlebrow middle ground in the British press. In American terms, imagine a newspaper pitched in tone and style somewhere between the New York Times and the New York Post, with a measure of the Weekly World News mixed in. Politically it has always hewed to a far-right agenda, from its mid-1930s sympathetic portrayal of Adolf Hitler to its mid-1980s fawning over Margaret Thatcher. Culturally, the paper has in recent years slipped into more of a tabloid vein from its comparatively respected glory days of the 1950s and 1960s.
Ironically, the Daily Mail has its place in Beatle folklore and song history. The line about "4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire" in John Lennon's "A Day in the Life" was inspired by a story in the Daily Mail -- regular reading in the Lennon household in 1967. And in 1966 the subject of one of Paul McCartney's songs had a son "working for the Daily Mail -- it's a steady job but he wants to be a Paperback Writer."
Since Harrison first revealed that he had successfully treated throat cancer in 1997, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday have been in the forefront of the tabloid pack chasing the story to see if new ill health would arise. The savage murder attempt on Harrison in late December 1999 by a deranged individual only heightened the sharklike appetite for stories about Harrison's imminent demise.
Tabloid spirits may have risen in May of this year when Harrison revealed that he had been treated for lung cancer at the Mayo Clinic in the United States -- though the fact that the operation was a success would have thwarted plans for death coverage. Early this July rumors started to circulate in Europe that Harrison had a brain tumor and was undergoing treatment in an exclusive Swiss clinic.
Harrison was distressed by the myriad press reports about his treatment in Switzerland and on July 11 sanctioned the release of the following statement through his lawyers: "I am feeling fine and I am really sorry for the unnecessary worry which has been caused by the reports appearing in today's press. Please do not worry."
This immediately followed an official statement from Dr. Franco Cavalli, the top cancer specialist at the Oncology Institute of Southern Switzerland in Bellinzona. The statement was read aloud to the media on July 9 by hospital director Luca Borner and distributed in print form. The exact wording as reported by the AP, Reuters and other press agencies, and reprinted in hundreds of newspapers and Web sites worldwide on July 10, was: "Mr. Harrison was referred to the hospital to undergo a course of radiotherapy. He successfully completed this course more than a month ago and we foresee no need for further treatment here."
This wording was reproduced in all the major British newspapers on July 10 with one exception: the Daily Mail, which instead ran an article that included this quote, purportedly from Cavalli: "He has not recovered, but he is not a patient any more." Curiously, no other media outlet has ever reprinted this remark. Nor has Cavalli been quoted as saying anything remotely like it to anyone else. The Oncology Institute states that the positive quote of July 10 was his sole comment.
