Tom Scotney

No one’s perfect, we all make mistakes. But I’ve not seen many mistakes in journalism as big as this one, where the Dubliner magazine printed fake nude photos of Tiger Woods’s wife and linked her with porn websites. It’s absolutely gobsmacking quite how much they cocked this one up, getting it completely wrong on almost every count in the article, not-so-hilariously-now titled “Ryder Filth for Dublin”.

So the Dubliner is now out of pocket by an estimated 125,000 euros. Their apology statement, which I’ve included in full here, simply has to be read to be believed at the sheer level of grovelling they’re having to do. And it’s also a bloody good laugh too, if only to know (hopefully) that you’ll never mess up quite as badly as these guys did . Enjoy!

“In our September 2006 issue we published an article which referred to Elin Nordegren Woods, at a time when she was in Ireland, attending the Ryder Cup in which her husband was playing on behalf of the United States.The story was cheap, tasteless, and deliberately offensive. It was also completely untrue. The article was accompanied by a nude photograph of a woman falsely identified as being Elin Woods, and the article falsely stated that other such photographs were to be found on internet porn sites. The article was entitled “Ryder Cup Filth For Dublin?”.

The photograph was not of Ms Nordegren Woods. There are no such photographs of Ms Nordegren Woods on internet sites or elsewhere. Ms Nordegren Woods has never posed, or been photographed, nude. The story was utterly and comprehensively false.

The story and photograph generated worldwide publicity which was profoundly hurtful to Ms Nordegren Woods. It is particularly shameful that this article was published at a time when Ms Nordegren Woods was, like thousands of others, a guest in this country and when the international media attention was focused upon the event.

There is, and was no excuse for the story. We recognise that our subsequent efforts to explain and excuse the publication and to make self serving and qualified apologies, have only made matters worse.

The article was not a “satire”; the publication was not a “parody”: it was a cheap, vulgar lie which was unforgivably insulting to Ms Nordegren Woods. Rudimentary checks should have meant that the story was not written. Basic decency ought to have prevented the article from being published.

We now apologise unreservedly, completely and unequivocally to Ms Nordegren Woods. We have agreed to pay to her a substantial sum by way of damages, and a contribution towards her costs.

Ms Nordegren Woods has, from the outset, expressed her intention to donate the entire sum to a charity of her choice. We recognise and appreciate her generosity in so doing. We wish to obtain the maximum publicity possible for this apology and we invite media outlets and particularly those which published the original story to give prominence to this apology. We should not have discussed Ms Nordegren Woods at all: we will never do so again.”