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More grumbling about the Press Council
By Steven | February 11, 2008
A lot of lawyers I know think the Press Council is a waste of time. It’s generally pro-press, it’s poorly resourced, its decisions are sloppy, and it has no power to impose a penalty worth spit.
Heck, I’ve criticised the Press Council myself in the past. But recently, I’ve been encouraging people to take another look. Recent decisions seem more rigorous and better structured. They are increasingly holding some papers and magazines accountable for serious lapses (see the Coddington-“Asian Angst” case, for example). There have been some fascinating split decisions, too, with meaty debates about ethical issues (about inaccurate women’s magazine covers and the privacy rights of criminals’ families, for example).
But now, alas, I’m going back to grumping. The latest batch of Press Council decisions contain one that stinks, and a couple that are at least whiffy.
The stinker really needs to be filed under “silly decisions that don’t really count because they’re about trade publications that nobody reads.” (See also: this case). Because if you were to take this decision seriously, it seems to stand for the proposition that a publication can do an end-run around accuracy and balance requirements by simply not publishing any letters to the editor.
There is, it seems, a monthly magazine called “FMCG” that covers businesses involving fast moving consumer goods. It has a circulation of more than 8,000 and was available (the Press Council found) to the public. Last year, it ran a column that I am going to call “the happy chicken column”. Here is an excerpt:
Much like the two-legged New Zealanders, the modern Kiwi chook is demonstrating the benefits of good breeding, freedom from disease and an overall better quality of life and health brought about by modern farming methods and biosecurity measures. Just as we are taller and bulkier than our ancestors, the chicken which, by the same comparison, has advanced the equivalent of hundreds of generations, is an altogether larger, healthier specimen than it has ever been. It also remains a breed apart from its egg-laying cousin with natural breeding selection fostering the attributes of each breed suitable to its various production qualities. This means that the egg you eat today is not the poultry meat you eat tomorrow.
It was by Michael Brooks. Michael Brooks is the executive director of the Poultry Industry Association of New Zealand. Were readers told this? They were not. Was his column accurate? Dr Michael Morris, past chair of the Campaign Against Factory Farming, certainly didn’t think so. He wrote a letter to the editor of FMCG:
Modern chickens are not larger because they are healthier and happier. Quite the contrary. The modern broiler is a genetic freak; selectively bred to grow so quickly that their legs and hearts cannot cope with the extra weight. Animal welfare scientists of international renown agree that this has meant increased incidence of lameness and metabolic disorders such as ascites in broilers. After studies showed that up to 20 percent of European broilers are in constant pain from lameness for the last third of their lives, Professor John Webster of Bristol University described the modern broiler industry as perhaps the ‘single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.’ A recent New Zealand study on lameness has revealed that up to 40 percent of broilers may be suffering from this painful condition.
Dr Morris ultimately supported this view with seven peer-reviewed references.
I am no expert in chicken welfare, but I know who I believe. Dr Morris has surely raised a serious question of accuracy, and exposed a need for balance.
What did the editor do? He decided not to print Dr Morris’s letter, because the magazine doesn’t publish letters to the editor. He thought about doing a follow-up news story. He forwarded the letter to the happy chicken columnist, but Mr Brooks did not wish to be involved in such a story. So he decided to take it no further. He did, however, make sure that Mr Brooks’ affiliation was properly included beneath his next column.
The Press Council somehow managed not to uphold this complaint. It’s a column, they said. “Columnists are entitled to state their views, and even to be wrong.”
Well, yes. Except that even columnists must get their basic facts right, as the Press Council has itself said in the past. If the Press Council had reasoned that the competing views were really matters of interpretation, not facts, or that any errors in the column were peripheral to its main substance, I could have bought that. But all we get is that columnists are allowed to be wrong. Except in some other cases where they’re not.
Still, shouldn’t Mr Brooks’ industry affiliation have been noted? Yes, said the Press Council. This was “a regrettable lapse and could have misled the reader.” But never mind: it looks like it was just a slip-up, said the Council. He was identified in other issues of the magazine.
Still, isn’t there a question of balance? Nah – the magazine had a policy of not printing letters. “The Press Council cannot condemn the policy if the magazine is consistent.” What’s more, even if it did publish letters, it didn’t have to publish Dr Morris’s one.
That may be so. But it doesn’t remove the obligation to provide balance somehow, through a news story, for example, or an addendum to a later column, or an editorial.
Well, I would have thought it doesn’t, but the Press Council seems to think otherwise. They just wring their hands. What can we do? He doesn’t publish letters. Doesn’t have to. That’s odd. Why doesn’t he publish letters? You’d think he’d want to. But he doesn’t. And we can’t make him. He was going to do a follow-up story. That’s good. Should’ve done a follow-up. Shouldn’t have dropped the story just because the columnist didn’t want to. Shouldn’t have done that, no. Still, guess we can’t uphold the complaint.
Memo to Press Council: yes you can. You really have a duty to uphold complaints like this one, if the requirement for balance is to mean anything at all.
Briefly, the two whiffy cases:
1. A complaint upheld against the Dominion Post for publishing a leaked draft Maritime Safety Authority report into a Cook Strait ferry incident, noting that the ferry came extremely close to capsizing and suggesting that the skipper showed poor judgment. A majority of the Press Council found the reporting was in the public interest, so it didn’t matter that the draft was plainly supposed to be confidential. But a majority also found it was unfair in that it didn’t state that the report’s conclusions might change. (On this point, the minority thought this was obvious from the word “draft”. I’m with the minority here. Readers know what a draft is. So I don’t think this complaint should have been upheld at all). The real action is over the issue of whether there was public interest in publishing a leaked draft when the investigation isn’t complete. Lawyer Ruth Buddicom sets out a thoughtful dissent arguing that there wasn’t, though it seems to me to be a fair call by the majority.
2. A complaint not upheld against the Otago Daily Times for inaccuracies in a backgrounder about police corruption. Long story. But my beef is with one sentence, about a hotel proprietor, the target of an undercover police sting seeking evidence of his involvement in a sex ring. The story reported, as bald fact, that the hotel proprietor “had made no admissions”. One of the police officers involved disagreed. He said the proprietor had made admissions. In fact, the police officer had written about those admissions in his book “Cover-ups and Cop-outs”. The ODT accepted that the admissions may have been made, but said they “were not a matter of public record”.
It’s an odd definition of public record that doesn’t include a published book, I think.
As the Press Council said, “the ODT incorrectly stated as fact what is a contentious matter.” It also identified two other errors, but regarded all three as minor. I’m not sure the first one was. The question of the proprietor’s admissions seems pretty central to the narrative. The error seems at least as significant as others that have been deemed worthy of upholding complaints in some other decisions.
This case strikes me as further evidence of the need for the Press Council to be able to uphold complaints without necessarily ordering the paper to publish a summary of the decision – to mark a significant error, but reserve the publication penalty for more serious lapses.
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