IPSO urges Mirror to speed up its justification of MP sexting sting
The head of UK press regulation Sir Alan Moses has urged the Sunday Mirror to respond quickly to his request for information over the “subterfuge” it used to obtain a story about a sexting minister.
Journalist Alex Wickham
Brooks Newmark, the minister for Civil Society resigned after the Sunday tabloid revealed he had sent an explicit picture of himself via Twitter to a male journalist posing as 22 year-old woman.
After it emerged that the story came as a result of a fake Twitter account Sir Alan Moses, the head of the Independent Press Standards Association (IPSO) said that the Sunday tabloid: “Will have to justify what they did, having regard to the fact that the editors' code is absolutely clear that this sort of method is only permissible in circumstances where no other means of discovering evidence of that which is already suspected exists, so, to put it loosely, last resort.”
Media commentator Steve Hewlett revealed on BBC’s Newsnight that the reporter responsible for the sting was freelance journalist, Alex Wickham, who writes for the Guido Fawkes blog and Breitbart UK.
Wickham, it appears, accidently outed himself as the author by tweeting about the story at 6pm on Saturday night, an hour before the journalists named as the authors of the piece did.
Exclusive: Tory minister Brooks Newmark resigns over sex scandal. Read all about it in tomorrow's Sunday Mirror.
— Alex Wickham (@WikiGuido) September 27, 2014
The editor-in-chief of the Sunday Mirror, Lloyd Embley, stood by the story saying there was a “clear public interest” because of Newmark’s roles as minister for civil society and co-founder of a group aiming to promote more female members in parliament, Women2Win.
Embley did however apologise to the two woman whose pictures the journalist took from Twitter and used as part of the sting saying: "We thought that pictures used by the investigation were posed by models".
Wickham created the fake twitter account, using a photograph of a woman called Malin Salin.
Salin told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet: “I do not want to be exploited in this way and that someone has used my image like this feels really awful, both for me and the others involved in this.”
IPSO rules demand that a newspaper respond to any complaints within 28 days however Moses said he would hope for a quicker response from the Mirror on "exactly how they justify what they did in that case”.
Both the Sun and the Mail confirmed they had been offered the story before the Sunday Mirror but had declined to publish.