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When several prominent journalists resigned this month from the British newspaper over false news articles, they also raised a broader question: Who owns it now?
Sept. 30, 2024, 12:01 a.m. ET
For decades, members of Britain’s Jewish population have marked life’s milestones by taking out notices in The Jewish Chronicle, a weekly publication founded in 1841 that bills itself as the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper.
Births, weddings and deaths — or, as some like to call them, “hatches, matches and dispatches” — all are recorded faithfully each Friday in a community publication that Jonathan Freedland, who until recently wrote a column for The Chronicle, once described as the “beating heart of British Jewry.”
So when Mr. Freedland and several other well-known journalists announced this month that they would stop contributing to The Chronicle, it seemed less a business breakup than a family rupture. The trigger was a series of sensational articles about the war in Gaza that ran in the paper but were later debunked as fabricated.
The Chronicle’s editor, Jake Wallis Simons, apologized for the articles, removed them from the paper’s website and severed ties with the freelance journalist who wrote them, Elon Perry. “Obviously it’s every newspaper editor’s worst nightmare to be deceived by a journalist,” he said in a social media post.
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“I take full responsibility for the mistakes that have been made,” Mr. Wallis Simons wrote, “and I will take equal responsibility for the task of making sure nothing like this can happen again.” He did not reply to requests for additional comment.
