The Daily Mail acts after being fact-checked

The Daily Mail has taken action after being fact-checked, and removed a photo that gave the impression a Chinese spy ship had entered Sydney Harbour this month, when it had not.

The news outlet acknowledged that it had published a 2019 photo of a Chinese naval vessel with the Sydney Opera House in the background alongside a news report about a Chinese warship that was sighted off the coast of Western Australia this month. This gave the false impression the spy ship had entered Sydney Harbour.

The Daily Mail removed the photo from the news article and from a Facebook post linking to the article after RMIT FactLab fact-checked the content and found that missing context around the 2019 photo gave readers the wrong impression.

You can read the fact check below:

^{By Frank Algra-Maschio}

The Daily Mail reported on a Chinese warship “spying on Australia”, but used a photo of a Chinese naval vessel taken in 2019 to give the false impression that the ship entered Sydney Harbour.

Eight days before the federal election, a Chinese naval vessel sparked outrage from former defence minister Peter Dutton when it was sighted in Australia’s economic exclusion zone off the coast of Western Australia. 

The Daily Mail reported on the sighting in an article published on May 13, but juxtaposed the article with a photo of a different Chinese naval vessel that docked at Sydney Harbour in 2019 as part of an agreed visit between the Australian and Chinese governments.

It then published a link to the news article in a Facebook post that included three images: a photo of the Chinese naval ship seen off the coast of WA, a 2019 photo of a different Chinese naval ship in Sydney Harbour and a photo of Mr Dutton.

The caption on the Facebook post included a quote from Mr Dutton: “It's without precedent a vessel would be so far south”, leading social media users to believe that a Chinese warship had entered Sydney Harbour, when in fact it did not.

The Daily Mail Facebook page that published the post has a large following with over 16m likes, and the offending post received 3.5k reactions and 1.3k comments. 

At top right, the post shows an image of a ship flying the flag of China at sea, whilst the image at bottom right shows a different naval ship in front of the Sydney Opera House.

Below these images, the post then states “A Chinese WARSHIP is in Australia’s waters in an unprecedented ‘act of aggression”’. 

The Facebook post fails to acknowledge that the ship pictured in front of the Sydney Opera House is not the ship Mr Dutton is referring to in his quote, implying that a Chinese ship entered Sydney on May 13 without prior approval of the Australian government.

In fact, the image of the ship in Sydney Harbour was taken during the visit of three Chinese ships to Sydney in 2019, part of a reciprocal trip following the visit of Australian ships to China. The ship clearly has the hull number 998, which according to the Department of Defence is the landing platform dock Kunlun Shan (LPD-998), one of the three vessels that visited Sydney in 2019. 

At that time, Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated the visit of the Chinese vessels to Sydney  “certainly wasn't a surprise to the Government”.

The other image in the post shows the ship Mr Dutton was actually referring to in his quote, the PLA-N Dongdiao Class Auxiliary Intelligence ship Haiwangxing.

This ship was first spotted off the coast of Western Australia on May 6, near Exmouth, remaining in this area until May 12. 

The journey of this ship off the coast of Western Australia is what prompted the comments of Mr Dutton, not the ship pictured in front of the Opera House.

The news article linked to the Facebook post also presents these images in a misleading manner.

The news article is titled ‘High-tech Chinese warship is SPYING on Australia and lurking off the western coast in an “unprecedented act of aggression”, says Peter Dutton: “Very concerning”’

The article describes the sighting and passage of the Haiwangxing, before presenting the comments of Mr Dutton, and includes a Department of Defence handout map of the movements of the Haiwangxing, and identifying the spy ship as “AGI-792”. The article also shows a handout picture of an identical (PLA-N) Intelligence Collection Vessel with a different hull number (797), which the Daily Mail erroneously captions as the Haiwangxing.

The article then provides the same image used in the Facebook post of the landing platform dock Kunlun Shan (LPD-998) in Sydney in 2019, with the following caption: “The Chinese spy ship was sighted 250 nautical miles north-west of Broome and tracking north-east towards Darwin at 12 knots (stock image pictured.)”