Sunday Times apologises after Rod Liddle's column last week breached Editor's Code (accuracy) by falsely claiming no opinion polls had been published {alleging a deliberate refusal!} to gauge levels of public support for Black Lives Matter movement. There are many such polls.

The newspaper has chosen to delete Liddle's entire section on this topic from its online editions, rather than to append the correction to the piece.

This does not end the issue, as complainants regard the correction as partial and insufficient to address the breach of the code.

Liddle made 3 false claims
1. There are no opinion polls due to (2) a deliberate policy to keep these facts 'shrouded' from the public, as pollsters 'would not like the results', since they would show that (3) the 'great mass' of public 'find the movement entirely repellent'

Ipso & the newspaper responded speedily. But I have told Sunday Times I regard this acknowledgement of one false claim (no polls) as falling short of their obligations on accuracy, and to it being 'essential the code be honoured not only to the letter but in the full spirit'

Given the columnist's concern about the facts about public opinion being 'shrouded', it seems to me ironic that the correction wishes to deal only with the process issue of substance, but to shroud the substance of the matter from the now misinformed readers.

I also expressed the view that it is disappointing to just drop the piece down Orwell's memory hole. Appending an adequate correction to the piece would be clearer about what the errors were and to make some effort to communicate what the true picture was too.

If the newspaper can't agree a resolution with complainants, it would go to the Ipso committee to adjudicate.

At this stage, neither newspaper nor Ipso have made any request for confidentiality, so I remain free to share at least my own views/side of this publicly with you.

My initial Ipso submission a week ago, a screenshot of the Liddle piece and an analysis of the oodles of polling on the topic can be found here. https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1305421703854649344?s=19

I think the conspiracy theory is quite serious false allegation. Albeit bizarre on 2 minutes thought. Obviously newspapers could commission such polls, eg The Sun did so, to break this made-up conspiracy of silence https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1305269294117335040?s=19

I appreciate that it would take some time and skill to remove the inaccurate and false claims from the text, given how central the imagined conspiracy theory is to it. Liddle is entitled to his opinions, but he is not under the code allowed to make up his own facts.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/corrections-and-clarifications-0pf6tgkzk

Extracts of the column's false and inaccurate claims.

Liddle wrong in his allergic-to-basic-research hunch that 'the mass of the public... finds the movement entirely repellent'. Evidence to date shows mixed attitudes, with strong opposition from around 1/6 people; most surveys also show a plurality of support over opposition.