Adjudication No. 349 (November 1987) [1987] APC 36

ADJUDICATION No. 349 (November 1987)

Senator Jocelyn Newman, a Senator for Tasmania has complained about The Hobart Mercury's coverage of the last Federal Election. She does not accuse the newspaper of any form of bias, for she believes all parties contesting the election would share her concern. She says that The Mercury chose to ignore almost every local issue unless it involved a frontbench Member, the Prime Minister or the Opposition Leader. None of her press releases were reported, although many appeared in The Examiner and The Advocate and, in some cases, the issue was also picked up by the mainland newspapers. She also states that The Mercury freely stated on several occasions that it did not wish to print any letter which discussed the election and so "closed off" what was an important and vital avenue which citizens should be able to use to air their thoughts.

In reply to the latter aspect of the complaint, The Mercury denies making such a ruling, and says that it had received four telephone calls, asking why letters on election issues had not been published. In reply to three of these, the newspaper advised that it would use only letters on the election if they were free of personal invective and if there was space left after other letters on other community issues were used. It explained this guideline on the ground of the amount of space already being devoted in the rest of the newspaper to the election. According to the editor, the fourth phone enquiry was from a woman working from the Liberal Party headquarters in Hobart who asked why all the letters she was typing on behalf of "little old ladies, members of the Party" were not appearing in The Mercury. On this, the editor comments:

"The questioner showed remarkable naivety. Only a few days before, The Melbourne Herald had attacked, in an editorial, the Labor Party for dirty tricks: i.e., the ALP had allowed one of its offices to be used to write letters to be used to try to swamp the Letter columns of the Melbourne newspapers. The Age some time before also made some scathing attacks on political parties indulging in letter writing campaigns."

In regard to the general complaint concerning The Mercury's coverage of the electoral campaign, the editor states that The Mercury applied to events involving politicians the criteria applied to all those things which can be loosely termed news:

• Are the activities interesting, relevant or informative?

• Are they entertaining or essential?

The Mercury also applied the parameters to this election which they had to other Federal polls in recent years.

If the issue is not purely local, then the appropriate person to comment is the Government or Opposition spokesman responsible. This, says The Mercury, means that backbench Members, which include many Senators, do not get gratuitous publicity through The Mercury's news columns. "Unfortunately some MPs and would-be MPs tend to believe that their presence at an event, or their comments on an event, in themselves, make that event newsworthy. Sometimes such an assumption is valid, but rarely."

The principles of the Press Council, in essence, require that the press be both free, and exercise that freedom with responsibility. Provided those principles are observed, the selection of items for publication is essentially a matter of editorial independence. This is the only reasonable way in which the enormous amount of material coming into editorial offices can be reduced to manageable proportions. The act of selecting what is deemed to be news is a highly professional activity and one which should not be monitored or supervised. The result may well be that an event, such as a Federal Election, is reported more widely in other newspapers or other sections of the media than in a specific newspaper. This is appropriate in a pluralistic democracy.

Senator Newman has presented evidence that election comment presented by her and three other Tasmanian Senate candidates was completely disregarded by The Mercury, which some readers could find regrettable. However as there is no suggestion of bias, the complaint concerning the coverage by The Mercury prior to the recent election is dismissed.

Senator Newman also complains concerning certain advertisements she sought to have inserted in the paper. Initially the paper indicated these could not be accepted as submitted, but after discussion one was in fact published. It may well be that the initial treatment of Senator Newman's proposed advertising was over-zealous having regard to the legal restrictions on such advertising. In regard to the nature of the laws relating to defamation, such zealousness could be understandable. This can occur not only in relation to the publication of advertisements, but also in relation to the news itself. While it is regrettable, it does not in itself breach the principles of the Press Council.