The president of the EFE Agency, Miguel Ángel Oliver, has announced that they will take measures after chaining two errors in less than a week and has called an extraordinary meeting of the Board of Directors. The public agency has had to apologize after publishing the news of the death of the writer Fernando Aramburu, which was not true and actually came from a fake account on social networks that posed as a publisher.
The false note “has been rectified and denied by the Agency just a few minutes after being published,” EFE acknowledged in a letter on Tuesday afternoon. “As president of EFE, I want first of all to apologize and ask for forgiveness from Fernando Aramburu, with whom I just spoke on the phone, to his family, to his loved ones and to his publisher, Tusquets. A misleading account on social networks has triggered an unforgivable error by EFE due to lack of verification,” Oliver said in the letter, in which he also apologizes “to the media, institutions, organizations and companies” that have contracted the services. of the agency.
It’s the second mistake in five days. On Thursday of last week they published a tweet with a headline about the alleged collision of a helicopter against the Crystal Tower in Madrid that was not real and corresponded, in reality, to a student’s test text. “In the current context, in which a very tough battle is being waged between truthful information and misinformation, between the servants of the accurate account of the facts and the propagators of hoaxes and lies, the two mistakes we have made have profound effects and are devastating for those who trust us and for our team,” Oliver acknowledged.
The president of EFE has called an extraordinary and urgent meeting of the Board of Directors to give “the pertinent explanations” and address measures “to prevent failures like these from being repeated.”
