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A Pathetic Judgement
149/Julian Petley
DATELINE: 11/1/06
On 2 August Granville Williams, Barry White and I wrote to the Press Complaints Commission, on behalf of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, about the front page story of the Express, 27 July 2005. Specifically, we complained that the headline 'Bombers are all spongeing (sic) asylum seekers' was inaccurate as, at the time that this was written, the identity of two of the suspected bombers was unknown. Furthermore, the headline was inaccurate even if it was taken to apply only to the two alleged bombers (Muktar Said Ibrahim and Yasin Hassan Omar) who had been identified at the time of writing, since neither was an asylum seeker. Ibrahim arrived at 14 in 1992 as a child of refugees fleeing Eritrea and was given exceptional leave to remain; he applied to become a British citizen in November 2003 and was granted a passport in September 2004. Omar, meanwhile, arrived at 11 as an unaccompanied minor from Somalia; he was also granted exceptional leave to remain, and, in May 2000, indefinite leave to remain. The inaccuracy about their being ‘asylum seekers’ was also repeated in the first line of the article, which stated that: ‘The suicide bombers who tried to murder scores of Britons were asylum seekers who raked in more than £40,000 in state handouts, it emerged yesterday’.
A further inaccuracy concerned the repeated failure to put the words 'alleged' or 'suspected' before each and every use of the words 'bomber' and 'killer' throughout the text - the Express, like nearly every other newspaper in Britain, committed a serious inaccuracy by simply ignoring the plain fact that, under British law, suspects are innocent until proven guilty.
We also added: ‘This is not a third party complaint. Racist, hate-filled and inflammatory articles such as this endanger the lives of all of us by helping to convince a tiny but dangerous minority of British Muslims that the majority population loathe them, thus, in their eyes, helping to justify their attacks on that population. We are complaining as three of those thus endangered’.
On August 4 we received an acknowledgement which stated, inter alia, that: ‘The editor of the Daily Express is currently a member of the Press Complaints Commission. However, as his newspaper is the subject of your complaint he will of course not take part in any discussion or consideration of the complaint by the Commission’.
By 30 September, having heard nothing from the PCC, we wrote again, to be told on 4 October that: ‘The Commission is currently considering this matter and we hope to be able to send you its decision in the very near future’. This turned out to be 15 November, when we discovered that our complaint had been rejected. True to form, the Commission dragged up the usual excuse that the article’s subjects had not themselves objected to it.
However, their second, and more significant, get-out concerned the relationship of the offending headline to the article itself. Thus they pointed out that: ‘While the Commission had previously censured newspapers for front-page headlines that have been insufficiently clarified or qualified by the following article - particularly by text that appeared within the body of the newspaper - it did not consider that that this example raised a similar breach of the code. The terms of the headline were clarified in the body of the article on the front page - that the two men had previously been "given sanctuary" by Britain and had therefore been involved in seeking asylum - and the Commission considered that readers would not have been misled as a result’. However, as noted above, the article itself, as well as the headline, claimed that the men were asylum seekers. Furthermore, the PCC’s suggestion that being ‘given sanctuary’ and seeking asylum are synonymous is both specious and, in itself, highly inaccurate. It is also remarkably hypocritical, coming as it does from a body which, in October 2003, issued a statement on refugees and asylum seekers which warned that: ‘The Commission is concerned that editors should ensure that journalists covering these issues are mindful of the problems that can occur and take care to avoid misleading or distorted terminology’. The PCC also defended the Express on the ground that it was ‘expressing a view about particular people connected with a recent news incident’, which, since the item purported to be a news story, and a front page one at that, would appear to be completely at variance with the Commission’s own Code of Practice, which states that : ‘Newspapers, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact’.
The lessons for editors from this grubby exercise in excusing the inexcusable are clear for all to see: as far as the PCC is concerned, inaccurate headlines are fine and dandy as long as the inaccuracies are repeated - not to say embroidered - in the main body of the text. And editorials masquerading as front page news get the green light too.
But how come it took the PCC more than three months to come up with such intelligence-insulting sophistry and mind-boggling circumlocution? As the PCC’s letter of 4 October put it: ‘The investigation of some cases takes more time than others’. But perhaps it should have added: ‘Especially when the complaint concerns a paper edited by a member of the PCC itself’. One can only guess at the probable shenanigans inside the PCC which led up to this tardy, pathetic and threadbare judgement, but if ever a case gave impetus to the growing campaign to have the PCC declared a public authority for the purposes of the Freedom of Information Act, and thus to have its inner workings opened up to public scrutiny, then this is it.
Last modified: Wednesday, January 11, 2006
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PCC rejects CPBF Express complaint
CPBF launches complaint against Express
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World Press Freedom Day on Friday May 3, 2013 is being marked in Britain by a rally to highlight the dangers facing journalists in Turkey and in this podcast, Nicholas Jones speaks to Barry White, Organiser at the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and Sam Bamford, the TUC's policy officer for Eastern Europe and Africa about the importance of a campaign to highlight international press freedom.
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