British Sky Broadcasting, as most of us are all too aware, is part of the Murdochs’ News Corp. A nasty ailment they’ve picked up from their bedfellows in Wapping has just got them into trouble again.

For they have acquired from them the compulsive habit of making up stories and saying what they like about anyone, with no reference to the actualité. They had the astonishing, absurdly fanciful effrontery to describe Robert Murat, a totally innocent man, as acting like Soham murderer Ian Huntley in the days after Madeleine McCann vanished in Portugal.

Yesterday in the High Court, they were made to apologise for publishing these false allegations about Murat and for the great distress it must have caused him. As the court ruled, there is now, since November 14th, on the Sky website an apology and unequivocal admission of their guilt over their story about Robert Murat which will stay on the site for the next 12 months.

Sky were also ordered to pay ‘substantial’ damages of an undisclosed amount to Mr Murat.

Most of the rubbish papers have had to pay up over lies they’ve written in their rush to fill pages with anything about the tragedy of the missing girl. Sadly, as long as there is a section of the public who carry on buying these papers on the basis of loud, repetitive headlines about Madeleine McCann, editors and their proprietors will see the damages they’ve had to pay as justifiable promotional costs.

The case for hitting offending papers where it hurts – by depriving them of one or more days’ publication – gets stronger every day.  And if editors were going to be deprived of the right to edit, they’d think longer and harder about lying to the public before they did it.