Adjudication No. 377 (September 1988) [1988] APC 24

ADJUDICATION No. 377 (September 1988)

Mr George Krooglik complains concerning the failure of the Sydney Morning Herald to report a large protest rally attended by many thousands of people in Melbourne on 30 January 1988 on proposed new gun legislation. Mr Krooglik says that he cannot understand how one of Australia's largest protest rallies since the days of the Vietnam war could be totally omitted by one of Australia's largest newspapers. "The inference one could reasonably draw from such an omission could be that it was deliberately omitted because of the then NSW government's proposed gun legislation and that publishing such an event in another state could harm the NSW government electoral chances in the forthcoming election."

Mr Krooglik has provided copies of newspaper articles reporting the protest march in The Age, The Australian, the Melbourne Sun and the Sun-Herald.

Mr Krooglik also complains that the Herald did not reply to a letter sent to it. The Editor-in-chief did ask the Press Council to pass on his apologies to the complainant for the Herald's failure to respond but as far as the Editor-in-chief could find out the paper did not seem to have received it.

In response to the complaint itself the Editor-in-chief says that the protest was not considered sufficiently newsworthy to merit attention in the Herald two days after it was held. (The Herald is not published on Sundays) "Many events compete for coverage on our news pages every day; for Monday's news columns - as for every day's columns - we look for articles that are fresh or have some new angle. An interstate march that many of our readers would have seen on television news reports two nights previously, or heard about on radio news reports two days earlier, or seen mentioned in the previous day's Sunday paper, is no longer news. If there is plenty of news copy on a Sunday night, then I'm afraid the less newsworthy items don't make it into the paper."

The determination of what is in fact news obviously involves the exercise of editorial discretion. In a case such as this, the Council would not presume to attempt to substitute its judgement for that of the editor; the Council's only requirement is that the exercise of editorial discretion be bona-fide and not tainted by an improper purpose. In the complete absence of any evidence of improper purpose the Council concludes that the determination not to publish any reference to the item concerned for the reasons given was in fact a legitimate exercise of editorial discretion. The complaint is therefore dismissed.