Sorry seems to be the largest word

As the McCanns secure front-page apologies, Joy Lo Dico looks back at other times when newspapers had to grovel

By any standards, it was a remarkable apology. The Daily Express and Daily Star used their front pages on Wednesday to tell Kate and Gerry McCann that they were sorry for suggesting "that the couple caused the death of their missing daughter, Madel- eine, and then covered it up". Their Sunday sister titles follow suit today, and the papers' parent company has made a payment of 550,000 into the Madeleine Fund.

That payment was dwarfed when the Daily Mail paid 4m in libel damages and costs to casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson after it said he had engaged in "cut-throat, ruthless and despicable" business practices.

A rather extraordinary week, then, but newspapers have often been forced to hang their heads in shame. Poor research, exaggeration, grandstanding and even hoaxes have all come before humiliating climbdowns. In 1887 The Times published a letter supposedly written by the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell saying he was supportive of, and complicit in, the murder of the Chief Secretary of Ireland's under-secretary. The Times thought the story so good, it ran a double-column headline for the first time in its history. The letter was a forgery, Purnell sued and the paper was fined 200,000.

Amazing as it may seem, given the events of the past week, libel was much bigger business in the last century. Now actions are on the wane, says media lawyer Mark Stephens. "A lot of celebrities who realised the repetition of and longevity of trials weren't worth it." But even when there isn't a libel case to scare the papers, a few straight facts can have a similar effect - as we show here.

SEVEN BIG CLIMBDOWNS

'The Observer' - MMR, front page, 8 July 2007

The paper claimed a Cambridge research team had supposedly found a rise in the prevalence of autism to one in every 58 people, and claimed two of the researchers had linked this to the MMR jab. Unfortunately, it ran the story off a study that had yet to analyse its data or reach formal conclusions. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, head of the study, said The Observer had been "irresponsible" and and no link between MMR and autism had been verified. The paper has removed the article from its archive.

'The Sunday Times' - the Hitler Diaries, 24 April 1983

Rupert Murdoch paid $1.2m for the diaries, "unearthed" by German journalist Gerd Heidemann, to be run in his UK newspapers. The Times ran the original story on the Saturday followed by serialisation in The Sunday Times the next day. Included were such nuggets as "must not forget tickets for the Olympic Games for Eva". The diaries had originally been authenticated by a team of historians including Hugh Trevor-Roper, at the time also a director of Times Newspapers. Two weeks later, they were revealed as fakes.

George Galloway v 'The Daily Telegraph' - 22 April 2003

In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, the paper's foreign correspondent, David Blair, found documents apparently from the office of the head of Iraqi intelligence saying that the then Labour MP had received money from Saddam Hussein's regime through the oil- for-food programme. Galloway denied this, questioned the documents' authenticity and sued. The Daily Telegraph argued that publishing the documents was in the public interest, but was criticised by the judge for not merely adopting the allegations but for having "embraced them with relish and fervour". Galloway was awarded damages of 150,000.

'The Sun' - Hillsborough apology, 7 July 2004

In April 1989, 96 Liverpool fans died in a crush at the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield. The following Wednesday, The Sun, under the stewardship of Kelvin MacKenzie, ran a front- page headline, "The Truth", under which it claimed some Liverpool fans picked the pockets of the victims, urinated on the police and assaulted them. People in Liverpool were outraged and boycotted the paper. The row flared up again in 2004 when Wayne Rooney, then playing for Everton, sold his story to the newspaper, to the disgust of his fellow Liverpudlians. The Sun decided it was time to back down over Hillsborough coverage and ran a full-page unreserved apology.

'The Sun' - "Sorry, Elton", 12 December 1988

In 1987 the paper published a front-page story under the headline, "Elton in vice boys scandal", which wrongly claimed he'd had sex with under-age rent boys. The Sun followed it up with another story claiming the singer had removed the voice boxes of his guard dogs because their barking was keeping him awake at night. Elton John took the paper to court over both stories and further homophobic articles and won 1m in libel damages, then the largest payout in British history. The Sun ran a front-page apology.

The 'Daily Mirror' - hoax Iraq torture photos, 14 May 2004

With Abu Ghraib still fresh in the mind, the Daily Mirror was handed photographs of what appeared to be British soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment torturing Iraqi prisoners. Editor Piers Morgan, believing them authentic, ran them on the front page. Over the next two weeks they were systematically dismantled by the British army and military experts. Morgan stood by the story until he was sacked two weeks later by the paper's owners, who admitted they been the victim of a "calculated and malicious hoax".