The Daily Star was removed from sale a Manchester airport, last week, due to its use of an overly sensational and disturbing headline and image: ‘TERROR AS PLANE HITS ASH CLOUD’.
Several other airports (Gatwick, Leeds-Bradford, Bristol and Liverpool) had removed the newspaper from their shelves the previous day, but allowed the paper to be sold on the 22nd.

A spokesman for Manchester Airport said that it had been a joint action by WH Smith staff and their airport colleagues.
The Daily Star’s sensational headline had been accompanied by a computer enhanced image of a jumbo jet with its engines on fire. It was felt that this had the potential to cause panic among passengers.
The newspaper has received widespread criticism for the headline and image. Some have likened it to the Sun-Hillsborough debacle in which the Sun newspaper published inappropriate criticisms of Liverpool football fans after the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989.
Some have described the Daily Star’s action in publishing this headline as ‘blatant psychological terrorism’. The image used was derived from a TV mock up of an incident from 1982 and this was not made clear to readers. Anyone looking at the front page would have been led to believe that the image was that of a flight which had gone through the volcanic cloud after commercial flight restrictions had been lifted the previous day.
There is no doubt that the Daily Star headline and image were misleading and inaccurate. This style of reporting is more about newspaper sales than it is about providing accurate and timely information to readers. But was the action of Manchester Airport in removing the newspaper from the shelves of WH Smith an over-reaction?
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