The president of the EFE Agency, Miguel Ángel Oliver, announced that he would take action after making two mistakes in less than a week and called an extraordinary meeting of the board of directors. The public body had to apologize after publishing the news of the death of writer Fernando Aramburu, which was not true and actually came from a fake social media account posing as a publisher .
The false note “was rectified and denied by the Agency just a few minutes after its publication,” EFE acknowledged in a letter Tuesday afternoon. “As president of EFE, I want above all to apologize and ask for forgiveness from Fernando Aramburu, with whom I have just spoken on the phone, to his family, to his relatives and to his publisher, Tusquets. A misleading social media account triggered an unforgivable error on the part of EFE due to a lack of verification,” Oliver said in the letter, in which he also apologizes “to the media, institutions, organizations and companies” which have retained the services of the EFE. agency.
This is the second error in five days. On Thursday of last week, they published a tweet with a title about the alleged collision of a helicopter against the Crystal Tower in Madrid which was not real and corresponded, in fact, to a student’s test text. “In the current context, where a very tough battle is being fought between truthful information and disinformation, between the servants of the accurate narration of the facts and the propagators of hoaxes and lies, the two errors that we have committed have profound consequences and are devastating for those who trust us and for our team,” admitted Oliver.
The president of the EFE called an extraordinary and urgent meeting of the board of directors to give “the relevant explanations” and consider measures “to prevent such failures from happening again”.
