BREAKING: The Daily Express back down and publish an apology for falsely claiming there was a "by-election poll" showing a tie between the SNP and Reform

As you'll probably remember, two weeks ago I pointed out that there was a deliberately misleading headline in the Daily Express which read "Humiliation for SNP as Nigel Farage's Reform UK now level in shock new by-election poll".  That clearly implied there was a poll of by-election voting intentions in the Hamilton, Larkhall & Stonehouse constituency showing the SNP and Reform UK level with each other, when in fact what was being referred to was the tiny, unweighted Scottish subsample of a GB-wide voting intentions poll.  I asked if there was any Scot Goes Pop reader who felt able to make a complaint to the press regulator IPSO, and also said I would make a complaint if nobody else did.

I can confirm that a complaint went forward, and as a result the Express have completely backed down - not only have they amended the article, but they have published a correction and apology, both in the article itself and on a standalone basis linked to from the newspaper's homepage.  I'm a veteran of past complaints about Reach plc publications (the stable includes the Express, the Record and the Mirror among others), and I've even dealt with the same Complaints Officer before, and I therefore know their usual approach is to make only very minor concessions in the hope of getting the complainant to accept far less than he or she should and to drop the complaint.  For them to totally climb down in this way suggests they were worried about something.  Either there must be some sort of precedent that made them think IPSO would take a particularly dim view of their false headline, or they must have had too many complaints upheld against them recently and are trying to get the numbers down a bit.

By accepting this as an informal resolution of the complaint, it does mean it will not be officially recorded as an upheld complaint and it won't count against the Express in the statistics.  However, my guess is the wisest thing to do is to keep our powder dry in case an even more important complaint comes up later.  I'd just like to make two observations, though -

1) To an extent the Express have still got away with their stunt, because any harm caused to the SNP by the fraudulent headline would have been caused before the by-election took place.  The Express waited until almost a week after the by-election before issuing the correction.

2) Incredibly, IPSO's procedures have become even more weighted against complainants than they used to be.  IPSO used to inform you if they rejected your complaint out of hand at the preliminary stage, whereas now they say if you don't hear anything within 21 days, that is the only indication you'll get of a rejection.  You then have 14 days to lodge an appeal.  This change of approach can only be seen as a cynical attempt to vastly reduce the number of appeals by maximising the chances that the complainant will forget all about it during the short window of opportunity.  When I received the email telling me the complaint was going ahead, I realised that I had actually forgotten about the whole thing for two or three days, and therefore I would guess there's a 50%+ chance I might not have remembered to chase things up when the 14-day window opened up.