More yachting churnalism

MailOnline's right-hand column of celebrity stories is like crack, or pickled-onion flavour Monster Munch. You know it's bad for you, it certainly isn't nutritious, and yet... But is the daily diet of tanned soap stars flaunting their beach bodies really worth attempting to fact-check?

Well, Stewart Campbell, deputy editor of Motor Boat & Yachting and the FleetStreetBlues reader who blew a hole in the side of the churnalistic stories about the '£3bn superyacht' - also featured on MailOnline, natch - did just that. And the story he's been looking at is this.

It's a classic of the genre - some photos of a Z-list celebrity doing whatever it is Z-list celebrities get up to, a single tweet ('At the boatshow... Put a deposit down on a sunseeker ;) bring on summer!) and there's your story. Fact-checking never entered the equation.

So Stewart Campbell put in a call:

Me to Sunseeker marketing department: Is this true?

Sunseeker marketing department: No.

Not sure why the Daily Mail couldn't do that. 

If we've learnt anything at the Leveson inquiry this week, of course, it's that a PR's denial doesn't mean that a story isn't true. But this wasn't the celeb's agent, this was the company's PR department, and it soon transpired there was another simple explanation.

I have not bought a sunseeker yacht.... But I have put a deposit down to charter one for the summer... I do well but not that well hahaha!Mon Jan 16 10:24:16 via Twitter for iPhoneMario Falcone
Mario_Falcone

Does it matter? There are those who'll say it's a trivial story about an unimportant celeb, it's not libelling anyone and it's pickled-onion Monster Munch anyway so no-one expects it to be factually correct.

But here's the thing: MailOnline now knows it's untrue. There are comments on the article pointing it out, there's Mario's tweet, there's the denial from Sunseeker and there's now this post. And yet just as with the £3bn superyacht that never was, the completely false story will remain, uncorrected, for posterity.