38 Degrees are hypocrites

A full week ago the campaigning organisation 38 Degrees published a post on their Facebook feed that included a graphic that claimed the NHS needs £8 billion per year by 2020 and listed the amounts pledged so far by each of the parties claiming Labour are the highest at £2.5 billion with the Tories and the Lib Dems on £2 billion each.

The problem is that figure for the Lib Dems was wrong. The party had already pledged to spend the extra required £8 billion as this Guardian piece from January makes clear.

Many, many, many people pointed out this error in the comments below the piece. And each time, painstakingly 38 Degrees responded individually to these comments conceding that they had made an error and acknowledging the Lib Dems had made the commitment they were asking for.

At no point did 38 Degrees update the graphic in the original post. So the thousands of people who saw the post but didn't scroll down and read the comments, after 38 Degrees realised their mistake would still have been misled.

Of course the best thing to do would have been to create a new Facebook post with a new graphic and to highlight the error they had made to make it clear what the real Lib Dem figure is.

I tweeted 38 Degrees two days ago when I became aware of this error:

.@38_degrees Why have you still not corrected yr chart claiming LDs only pledged £2bn for NHS? You've had 5 days. It makes you look partisan
— Mark Thompson (@MarkReckons) March 31, 2015

To be fair to them they did tweet this in response to me:

@MarkReckons Hi Mark, sorry about the mistake. Here is a correct chart, kindly adapted by @iampav pic.twitter.com/jaa9rYaF4r
— 38 Degrees (@38_degrees) March 31, 2015

But as I then pointed out to them:

.@38_degrees Thank you but it is not me that needs to see it. It's all your Facebook followers who were misled by the original chart.
— Mark Thompson (@MarkReckons) March 31, 2015

and

.@38_degrees You need to do a new Facebook post with this new image highlighting the previous error so everyone is clear. That's only fair.
— Mark Thompson (@MarkReckons) March 31, 2015

to which they responded:

@MarkReckons agree - we are doing this shortly.
— 38 Degrees (@38_degrees) March 31, 2015

At the time of writing, a week on from the original mistake and two days after they promised me they would to do a new, correcting post, 38 Degrees have still not done this.

They have clearly been active on the feed though doing posts about zero hours contracts and the NHS.

They now appear to have deleted the original post (although the cynical amongst you might feel this is less to correct the error and more to clean the feed so such a blatant error is no longer visible) which is why I cannot link to it.

The hypocrisy in this situation is quite evident. 38 Degrees was one of the organisations who most vociferously supported the Leveson Report and even launched a petition which currently has almost 30,000 signatures calling upon the government to implement Leveson in full.

Of course one of the key recommendations of Leveson was for the new body to have powers to enforce the prominence of timely corrections when newspapers make errors to have an equivalent prominence to the original story.

38 Degrees have singularly failed to do that in this case where they have made a mistake. Of course a lie is half way around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. In this case many of the thousands of people who saw the original Facebook post and chart (before it became an unpost) will still likely believe it.

It appears that 38 Degrees think that equal prominence should only be given to corrections by other people.

At least that is now clear.