So much for the Guardian being able to claim they are an impartial news agency.
LONDON – The Guardian was forced to amend an article on past Nobel Peace Prize winners on its Web site on Friday after it omitted the names of Israel’s prize winners.
Following the announcement of US President Barack Obama’s winning the 2009 prize, an article written by the newspaper’s news editor Simon Rogers listed the names of all Nobel Peace prize winners since the awards inception in 1909. However, all of Israel’s prize winners – Menachem Begin, Yizhak Rabin and Shimon Peres – were omitted.
In the 1978 entry, Menachem Begin’s name was missing, with only Egyptian president Anwar Sadat listed. The same error occurred in the 1994 entry with Yasser Arafat the only entry and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres missing.
The omission led to a number of frenzied entries in the article’s comment section.
In a statement on Friday, the newspaper blamed the mistake on a “technical issue,” saying the names was accidently omitted.
“For the Nobel Peace Prize winners list, we used data from nobelprize.org. However, there was a technical issue during the data transfer from the site, which meant that many of the names of the joint winners of the Nobel Peace Prize were accidentally omitted, although the country of origin of the winners was not. This has now been corrected,” a Guardian spokesperson said.
The article’s author, Simon Rogers, also posted an entry online: “It’s my fault, I’m afraid. I decided where there was more than one winner to put the joint one in the second column. Unfortunately, this caused a few problems, which we’ve now rectified. Please let me know if you spot any other missing names.”