Last November OnTheWight ran an article about a report in the County Press.
It said that a CP reporter had incorrectly stated a decision to scrap the sale of the Blackgang Viewpoint car park had been made in private and Cllr Jon Gilbey had been mis-quoted following the November Cabinet meeting.
The basis for our article was information directly provided to OnTheWight by Cllr Gilbey. He’d told us in no uncertain terms that the decision had not been made in private and that he’d been mis-quoted by the CP reporter. He went so far as to point out the specific words the reporter had got wrong in their article.
Contacted by the CP
The article had only been live for a short time before the CP contacted OnTheWight. This marked the start of a great deal of time being spent trying to get to the bottom of this.
During this Cllr Gilbey did a complete about-face and, despite stating categorically to OnTheWight that the situation had been misinterpreted by the CP reporter, he then chose to support the CP version of what he’d said.
Apology
As readers know, OnTheWight works hard to not publish incorrect information.
We wrote the article on good faith, but on this occasion, through no fault of our own, some of what you may have read in that article wasn’t correct, so we wanted to take the opportunity of readdressing that.
We’ve already spoken to the reporter directly about this, but we’d like to take this opportunity to apologise for our mistake of believing the word of that Cabinet member over the reporter.
That, it turns out to our great surprise, was a mistake. One we certainly won’t repeating again in the future.
Image: patrickkiteley under CC BY 2.0
