We're sorry - but keep buying our products

This week has shown that noble art of the full-page newspaper apology is alive and well. Papers on Tuesday contained an ad from Tesco (in colour) apologising for its role in the recent silicon-in-petrol fiasco.

This act of contrition by the supermarket giant doesn't pull its punches. "We're sorry," Tesco announces in its headline. And the self-flagellation continues. "If petrol bought at Tesco has damaged your car, we'd like to say how sorry we are."

And today, as you leaf through your newspaper and perhaps contemplate the not-too-distant prospect of Sunday lunch, you may notice a full-page advert from Bernard Matthews. His company was at the centre of last month's bird flu outbreak which resulted in the cull of hundreds of thousands of turkeys.

In fact, today's ad isn't exactly an apology. The word sorry doesn't appear once.

Matthews's stance is that attack is the best form of defence, and he proclaims: "Our standards of hygiene and bio-security are some of the most stringent in the world". Defra, who said the turkey producer was warned several times about hygiene lapses before bird flu broke out, might have a different view.

The point of a newspaper apology is to put controversy to bed. The subtext of the advert is always: we messed up, we realise to our horror that we stand to lose millions of pounds as a result, we hope that this message will persuade you of our probity and good intentions, please resume buying our products in vast quantities.

It's something The Sun didn't quite get three years ago in its expression of regret for what it said after the 1989 Hillsborough football tragedy. You'll recall that in the aftermath of the disaster, the Sun carried a front-page story claiming that some Liverpool fans had urinated on rescuers and robbed the dead.

What provoked this untypical bout of self-loathing 15 years on was criticism that footballer Wayne Rooney (a Liverpudlian) had suffered for deciding to sell his story to The Sun.

Unfortunately for Britain's best-selling daily, the apology did more harm than good because it also went on to accuse rival newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror, owners of the Liverpool Echo, of "stirring up local trouble" to make commercial gain. One imagines the apology had minimal, if any, effect on the newspaper's circulation on Merseyside.

But the prize for the most grovelling apology in newspaper history must go to The Mail on Sunday, which in 1998 clearly decided that an earlier story it had carried alleging that actress Brooke Shield's has being held by French police on suspicion was totally, 100 per cent inaccurate.

The word "grovelling" barely does justice to the abjectness of its front-page contrition as, point by point, it demolishes or rejects virtually every single "fact" carried in the offending article. The edition even carries a second bout of apologising by its editor on page three. By comparison, this week's efforts by Tesco and Bernard Matthews look positively complacent.

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