Daily Mail and Liz Goddard's 10-year-old baby

A rather unfortunate choice of pullquote and photograph in a Daily Mail anti-abortion story today. As you can hopefully see from the scan below, the photograph is of a mother with a baby; the adjacent pullquote reads:

'Doctors said he'd die in ten minutes. Now he's ten years old.'

So that baby's 10 years old. Huh? Such a severe case of arrested development doesn't exactly strengthen the anti-abortion argument. Admittedly, the caption below the photograph then explains:

Liz Goddard and Will, at seven months. Today he is a healthy ten-year-old

However not only is this page element much smaller than the photo or the pullquote (and therefore less likely to draw the eye), but it implies that Liz Goddard was seven months old when the photo was taken...

(Click on the image below to see a larger version.)


4 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

The reason they didn;t have an uptodate photo of Will is because I lost my house key and couldnt get in to email a more recent photo in time for publication.

JD (The Engine Room) said...

Thanks, Liz – that's interesting. Certainly shows how human factors can cause unexpected problems for the production desk...

TootsNYC said...

How neat to hear the inside info from Liz!

The solution: add a tag line **under the quote** that says:

Left: Will Goddard at 4 months, with mom Liz.