Mirror lifted his blog without asking

Dave Gorman has exposed the Mirror for 'cheekily' lifting one of his blog posts without permission.

The tabloid yesterday ran two side-by-side opinion pieces asking: ‘Does Jeremy Clarkson have a right to be so offensive on TV?’

Mirror columnist Tony Parsons said ‘no’; Gorman argued ‘yes’, leaving the reader with the impression he’d been commissioned to write a piece supporting free speech.

Yet the newspaper had simply stolen something Gorman had written online, and published them as a bylined, 250-word column.

On his blog last night, he wrote: ‘I was surprised this morning to find a couple of messages saying, "I liked what you wrote in The Mirror, well done.” I was surprised because I hadn't written anything for the Mirror. It seems you don't have to these days.’

He said that someone at the Mirror had clearly seen his post and simply ‘cut and pasted it into the paper... which is a bit cheeky of them to say the least’.

Gorman added: ‘Oh well. As if we needed a lesson in not believing what we read in the papers at the minute.’

In his original article, Gorman contrasted the Twitter support for Paul Chambers – prosecuted over his joke ‘threat’ to blow up Robin Hood Airport – and Clarkson’s comments over the striking public sector workers. ‘You have to defend the jokes you don’t like as well as the ones you do,’ he wrote.

Gorman, who resigned from his column on the News of the Worldbefore the phone-hacking scandal forced it to close, told Chortle he wouldn’t be taking any action against the Mirror.

Published: 3 Dec 2011