Offering a lengthy and heartfelt apology, the Middle Eastern Broadcasting Center (MBC), a news and cultural program broadcasting to some 150 million people in the Arabic-speaking world, was forced to pull a story then issue an apology after viewers complained about a report that identified actor Daniel Radcliffe as gay and Cameron Diaz as bisexual, among other falsities, reports the Independent.com.
The piece, “a gay list of shame,” also incorrectly stated that Elton John wore a wedding dress to marry his long-term partner David Furnish earlier this year. Ricky Martin, Jodie Foster, Ellen DeGeneres and Neil Patrick Harris were also among those targeted in the piece.
“One of the junior editors of the Web site published an article offending some of the big Hollywood celebrity names, which by no means was reflective of the sites [sic] editorial policy nor point of view, without prior verification of the facts of the story plagiarized from another official site, ultimately offending a list of popular celebrities loved and followed in the Arab world,” the apology reads.
The article in question appeared in a segment called ‘Scoop With Raya’ on the broadcaster’s Web site MBC.com. The segment is aRaya Abirached,pparently fronted by who is a presenter for Arabs Got Talent – the Middle East’s answer to Simon Cowell’s talent show franchise.
“Regretfully, the editor in question had plagiarized the news off [sic] another Arabic Web site without factual verification of the article, therefore going against two of the major pillars of journalism: cross checking the validity of the news; and discrediting and not attributing the actual site from which the news was retrieved, causing a ripple effect of disciplinary action and investigative measures from the Web site’s end towards the employee in question, who is now on probation, and continues to investigate any other source that reflects the same with such irresponsible behavior.
“Mbc.net apologizes from its readers and the named celebrities, for the article that was published earlier on the scoop section of the site www.mb.net/scoop, and that is clearly not related to neither [sic] the presenter of the show ‘Scoop with Raya’, Raya Abi Rached, nor the show itself.”
