Adjudication No. 38 (September 1978) [1978] APC 15

ADJUDICATION No. 38 (September 1978)

The Australian Press Council has dealt with complaints against the former Sunday Argus, a supplement to the Sunday Telegraph which circulated in editions of that paper on sale in Sydney's western suburbs. The complainants are the N.S.W. Department of Education, a teachers college lecturer and a school teacher.

The articles, described by the paper as reports, were published between June 18 and July 9, 1978, They made a sustained attack on a Social Studies program put forward by the Department for upper Primary School children and called "People of the Western Desert".

The program was inspired by an American program known as MACOS (Man - A Course of Study) except that it aimed to introduce children to Australian aboriginal culture instead of Eskimo culture.

The merits or demerits of the program is a matter which falls outside the functions the Council to decide. The Council's sole concern is to determine whether the paper has so acted in relation to the principles of good journalism that the freedom of the press may be brought into disrepute.

The complainants and the paper have both put before the Council a mass of detailed material in support of their contentions and the Council has considered this material carefully.

A matter of some importance is that the paper of July 9, 1978, published a lengthy article containing the Department's answer to the paper's criticisms. The article was interspersed with some comments in reply, and this substantially reduced its effectiveness as a rebuttal of the criticisms.

The main burden of the complaints was that the matter published by the paper seized upon some passages in a reference book which the program recommends as essential for teachers, and criticised them as being intended by the Department to be presented directly to children and indeed to be acted out by them.

The reference book is called "Desert People" and is a work on anthropology written by a Professor of that subject at City University, New York. It is admittedly of great anthropological merit. It contains some passages which the paper brands as pornographic and some which for other reasons would make the book undesirable reading for children, and these passages the paper treats as intended to be presented to children.

The Department's program is provided in the form of a Kit containing some material for direct use in teaching the course to children, and a list of teachers' reference books one of which is "Desert People". This book the Sunday Argus describes as a "teacher's handbook", as "teacher's notes", as "used by teachers teaching 10 and 11 year old primary school students", and as "used to teach the course to children of 10 and 11". The ordinary reader of the paper would gather that the intended use of the book is to be in the actual teaching of the children. This is not true. The book is not put forward anywhere in the program otherwise than as a recommended part of the education of the teacher, to equip him or her with the width of knowledge necessary to teach the course with understanding. By giving the contrary impression the paper laid a foundation for a sustained attack on the program as wholly wrong for the education of children.

A good deal of the paper's criticism of the program consisted of comments on the American MACOS course and the drawing of a parallel between that course and the Department's program. The paper said, for example, that MACOS deals with the full range of social and sexual situations in the life of the Eskimos, including wife swapping, rape, cannibalism, suicide, infanticide and leaving elderly relatives to die in the snow because they have outlived their usefulness. It said that 10 and 11 year old children playact these situations and many more during the MACOS program, and it added: "The Western Desert course covers all these things and more". The quoted words are untrue. It also said; "As in the MACOS course, children act out situations described in the program". The plain inference is that children in the Department's program act out the social and sexual situations abovementioned, and this is untrue.

The paper also represented "Desert People" as "a teacher's handbook" for a course which had been "branded as pornographic by a branch of the Law Society", and it purported to quote a spokesman for that Society as saying: "It is difficult to see why teachers would need such explicit information to teach such young children". Again the conclusion was obviously invited that the passages referred to were teaching material.

The paper's attack on the program was couched in increasingly sensational terms, culminating in a charge that the Department was unwittingly the centre of a gigantic ideological plot and that the whole Australian way of life was at stake. The extravagant charges were obviously damaging to the Department and discouraging to teachers. They are not substantiated by any facts placed before the Council.

It cannot be too strongly emphasised that matter put forward by the Education Department for presentation to school children is a proper subject for critical appraisal by the Press. About fair criticism, even though expressed in the strongest terms and whether one agrees with it or not, there can be no legitimate complaint. But criticism which misrepresents is not fair and cannot be justified.

The complaint is upheld and the Sunday Argus is severely censured.