Adjudication No. 397 (March 1989) [1989] APC 10

ADJUDICATION No. 397 (March 1989)

On January 26 1989, a young man disappeared at a popular swimming spot near Launceston. His body was recovered from the water the next day.

The boy's mother, Mrs Lesley Bowen, complains about three aspects of the Launceston Examiner's reporting of this tragic incident:

• a headline in the January 27 edition ("Man drowns at Basin"), which stated the fact and cause of the man's death before either was confirmed by the discovery of his body. Mrs Bowen was distressed to read this account while she still maintained some hope that her son might be found alive.

• The naming of her son in the article before his death had been confirmed and relatives had been informed.

• An inaccurate report in the article that the man's father was believed to have been at the scene of the incident when it occurred. This error was acknowledged by The Examiner and corrected four days later.

In its defence, The Examiner points out that the drowning was the second to have occurred at the same spot within six days, and the third within 12 months. There was therefore cause for more than usual concern about swimmers' safety and this, according to the newspaper, warranted the treatment given to the story.

The editor says that the victim's name was given to The Examiner's reporter by a police spokesman. This is disputed by Mrs Bowen, who says she received an assurance from a representative of the Minister of Police that no police spokesman released any information to The Examiner and that the police report of the incident included Mr and Mrs Bowen's express wish that their son not be identified.

The Press Council is not in a position to establish the source of The Examiner's information about Mrs Bowen's son. It is concerned, however, at the paper's view that "police requests not to use the names of accident victims are usually meaningless" because the same names frequently appear the next day in newspapers' Death Notices columns.

This assertion is not immediately relevant to this case, because Mrs Bowen's son was not known to have died at the time of the article's publication. However, it infers that The Examiner was justified in publishing the victim's name and cause of death before official confirmation of the facts of the incident, and notification of relatives, had been completed. Clearly, such a view puts the paper at serious risk of breaching the convention that families' privacy at a time of extreme anxiety or grief should be respected until there are no outstanding grounds for further delaying the publication of personal details in tragic events.

The young man's drowning was an event of major significance in Launceston, and the Press Council appreciates The Examiner's role in highlighting safety issues at the site where it occurred. The Council does not believe this role would have been compromised, however, if the paper's report of the incident had been more sensitively worded to take account of the feelings of the victim's family at the time.

The complaint is upheld.