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Australian Press Council |
ADJUDICATION No. 1057 (November 1999)
The Australian Press Council has upheld a complaint against the Sydney Sunday newspaper The Sun Herald over a front-page article headed "Tubby Bats for Queen" published during the lead-up to the November 6 constitutional referendum.
The article claimed that, in a deal brokered by Prime Minister John Howard, former Test cricket captain Mark Taylor was set to urge Australians to vote against the Yes case. In the same issue, the newspaper also published an editorial which said some people would believe Taylor's decision was "just not cricket".
The following day, the Sun-Herald's sister publication The Sydney Morning Herald carried a page 2 paragraph headed "Taylor's denial," quoting Taylor's manager John Fordham saying that Mark Taylor would never endorse one side or the other in the referendum debate.
For its part, The Sun-Herald in its next edition on its Letters Page (page 78) carried a letter from John Fordham denying the report. The letter was followed by an editor's note accepting that Mark Taylor had no knowledge of a plan to secure him as a spokesman for the No case, and apologising for the embarrassment the report may have caused him.
Claiming the report was a "gross journalistic deception visited upon Sun-Herald readers," the complainant, Charles Chappel, asks a number of questions. These include why the original story was not referred to Taylor; why no apologies were issued to Mark Taylor and the Prime Minister; and why no explanation or apologies were given to readers who had been misled.
The Press Council does not accept that it was a deception given the reasonable belief the newspaper had in the correctness of the story.
However the story was plainly wrong, which the newspaper accepts.
The publisher and the editor of the Sun-Herald, Alan Revell, said in defence of the newspaper that he had spoken to Mark Taylor and offered his personal apology. At the time, in letters to other readers, he had acknowledged that the newspaper only wished to publish stories that were truthful and accurate, and regretted that on this occasion it had failed. He had also apologised on radio.
He said that the incident caused a great deal of self-examination and re-examination of the news gathering processes at the newspaper, and as a result he believed such an error would never happen again.
The Australian Press Council accepts that the newspaper did reach its peace with Mark Taylor, and did apologise for the embarrassment caused him.
It recognises that unusual circumstances were involved but the report was on an emotive issue, involving a sporting hero. It believes that the newspaper's claimed two million readers were owed a prominent explanation as to how it got the report so wrong.
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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/APC/1999/51.html