Guardian and Indy pick up on the New Statesman’s five-day-old story about easyJet{C}
We’re delighted, of course, that Stephen Morris’s scoop about easyJet withdrawing the latest issue of their in-flight magazine after pressure from the New Statesman should have been picked up by so many news outlets. But we’re perplexed that two of the more venerable organs to have run with the story should apparently only just have happened upon it, almost a week after Stephen first broke it on newstatesman.com, and then without acknowledging our role in uncovering it in the first place.
Yesterday, the Guardian reported that the “budget airline . . . has been forced to withdraw almost 300,000 copies of its in-flight magazine because of protests over its use of Holocaust memorial sites as a backdrop for a fashion feature.” And today, with the alacrity for which it is famous, the Independent has weighed in, noting that easyJet “had been accused of “trivialising genocide” when eight pages of the November issue of its Traveller magazine featured models leaning against the stones of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, also known as the Field of Stelae.”
All true, of course. But, for the benefit of any Guardian and Independent readers who might happen to have dropped by, let me fill in one or two gaps. The “protests” that the Guardian refers to emanated in the first instance from the New Statesman, after Stephen contacted the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe to ask if they’d sanctioned the photo-shoot. And the accusation that the feature “triviali[sed]” genocide came from Labour MP Denis MacShane after he was alerted to easyJet’s breach of good taste by the New Statesman.
Just so we’re clear …