The Sun buries its Chris Jefferies apology – another nail in the coffin of self regulation

Eight papers have paid substantial damages to Chris Jefferies, the landlord of Joanna Yeates, for libellous suggestions related to her murder.

But for some reason The Sun website’s own search engine won’t show the apology when you search for his name …

But if you use the Sun website’s own search engine to search for either Chris or Christopher Jefferies, you can’t see the apology in the results.That’s a screenshot of the apology. As you can see, he’s changed from being Chris Jefferies (which is what they called him in the stories about him) to Christopher Jefferies, which doesn’t exactly help.

Here’s the results for a search for Chris Jefferies, organised into date order.

And here is the one result for a search for Christopher Jefferies.

No sign of the apology in either case …

What hope is there for self-regulation if newspapers can’t include in their own site’s search results the apologies they have made about “false suggestions he might have killed his former tenant Joanna Yeates, acted inappropriately towards pupils in the past, invaded his tenants’ privacy, was associated with a convicted paedophile and might have been involved in an unsolved murder in 1974”?

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