Adjudication No. 508 (July 1991) [1991] APC 42

Adjudication No. 508 (July 1991)

The Australian Press Council has dismissed a complaint that coverage by The Age of Melbourne peace rallies was neither honest nor fair.

Lesley Walker, of East Brunswick, complained about articles published on 26 and 27 January 1991, entitled "Tensions high as warring sides clash" and "Horrors of war", claiming they breached Press Council principles 1 and 2 (requiring honest and fair reporting and for a newspaper to take all reasonable steps to ensure the truth of its statements) and 11 covering the need for a published correction, retraction, explanation or apology in case of inaccuracy.

The second article headed "Horrors of war" on 27 January was, in fact, in a publication other than The Age and therefore cannot be considered part of a complaint against The Age.

A large part of the complaint is that the 26 January story referred to a police estimate of a peace rally crowd as 10-12,000 "which was larger than last week's rally".

The complainant says this contradicted a 19 January story in The Age which said attendance at the first rally was 20,000.

In its defence the paper refers to the difficulty of estimating crowd numbers. The 19 January story's estimate of 20,000 was given in the first paragraph as a figure "estimated by police at the scene". A subsequent paragraph in the same story said, "Last night police said their official estimate of the crowd size was between 8000 and 9000".

The 26 January story, says the paper, compared the two official police estimates for the two rallies and adds, "Perhaps this should have been stated more clearly". Nevertheless, the same story did say in its second paragraph that the crowd at Rally Two was estimated by organisers as 20,000. Thus both stories gave two sets of very divergent figures with proper source attribution and the newspaper can be held not to have transgressed its responsibility to ensure truth of its statements so far as they relate to crowd numbers.

A second part of the complaint says The Age reporting gave the impression that pro and anti-war demonstrations on 25 January were of an equal size while a headline "Tensions high as warring sides clash" gave the impression of a great deal of violence. It says The Age should have mentioned the demonstrations "were, on the whole, extremely peaceful".

The Council accepts the paper's defence that the 26 January report referred to "about 20 pro-war demonstrators" in one incident and "about 60 pro-war demonstrators" in another place, beside quoting the peace rally organisers as estimating their crowd at 20,000.

There were obviously tensions in the brief confrontation between groups from the pro-war and anti-war factions and The Age correctly reported this. It did not say there was violence. Similarly, the story's placement on page 1 and pictorial treatment were a correct newspaper judgement given the importance and size of the rally.