Nelson Mandela’s granddaughter and other people News Corp may have misquoted

Last month, the late South African president Nelson Mandela got some rest from his usual posthumous role as most obvious answer to the “Which person, living or dead, would you most like to have dinner with?” icebreaker to be deployed against the real enemies: Harry and Meghan.

According to a report which appeared in News Corp’s Australian tabloids and The Australian, Mandela’s granddaughter Ndileka accused the couple of “using” Mandela’s name and legacy for “profit” in their recent documentary series.

“Harry needs to be authentic and stick to his own story, what relevance does grandad’s life have with his?” she is quoted as saying.

Except … this isn’t true, according to a piece Ndileka wrote for British newspaper The Independent:

The words wrongly attributed to me, criticising them for quoting my grandfather, are not mine at all — they belong not to me, but to those who have amplified these falsehoods all over the world.

I am mortified to have seen how my words were twisted in such a way as to distort my genuine concerns about the commercial exploitation of my grandfather’s legacy.

News Corp declined to comment when the Nine papers asked about it, and the pieces remain on the respective websites without acknowledgment of Ndileka’s denial. But of course this is far from the first time the subject of a News Corp campaign has felt they’ve been credited with words they never said.

Anthony Albanese

“Albanese’s battle cry in war on wealth and family tax”, revealed The Australian in the lead-up to last year’s federal election. The story pointer told us the then opposition leader “sharply criticised capitalism and family wealth as causes of social injustice” and took aim at “incomes over $100,000”.

Except as the story revealed, Albanese had made these “previously unreported remarks” in the early 1990s when he was assistant general secretary of NSW Labor.

Louise Milligan

In a dreary recent episode of sparring between The Australian and the ABC’s Milligan, the Oz‘s Janet Albrechtsen ran a piece saying a speech Milligan delivered to the Women Lawyers Association “shamed female barristers and lawyers who defend people accused of sexual crimes” and left some attendees in tears. Milligan responded on Twitter that it was “(typical) misinformation by The Australian“, and claiming that Albrechtsen “put to me multiple inaccuracies about the speech, including phrases I never used. I replied they were demonstrably untrue. She ran inaccuracies anyway, without my individual denials.”

Tim Flannery

Before it (sort of) started believing in human-caused climate change, The Australian frequently took aim at high-profile scientists, none more so than 2007 Australian of the Year Flannery. He was frequently derided as an “alarmist”, particularly after he was named head of the Climate Change Commission by the Gillard government in 2011. One of the paper’s main allegations was that he had been scaremongering regarding rising sea levels to help drive down prices (Flannery’s house was on the Hawkesbury River). Flannery insists the quotes this reporting was based on were taken out of context. The Oz eventually printed a correction.