Adjudication No. 1222 (December 2003) [2003] APC 38

Adjudication No. 1222 (December 2003)

On 10 September the Northcote Leader published an article and photo headed Outside aid for women inside publicising a forthcoming benefit concert to raise funds for the Women's Prison Advocacy program. The concert had been organised by Dykes on Mics, who present a regular program on community radio 3CR. The producer Libby Jamieson contacted the paper with details of the organiser, performers and cost, expecting these to be published. The article gave details of date and place but not the name of the organising group.

Ms Jamieson's complaint to the Press Council was that this amounted to homophobic censorship. "I would have thought given the large lesbian demographic of Northcote that the paper would be concerned about reflecting the diversity of its readers," she emailed to the journalist, who then offered to meet her to explain her reasons.

Ms Jamieson declined. The journalist did not refer the complaint to her editor. Ms Jamieson did not contact anyone else at the paper, preferring instead to refer the matter to the Council.

In response, the paper claimed that the article "was put together to promote a benefit concert being held to raise money for the Women's Prison Advocacy program not specifically to publicise Ms Jamieson's own program". The paper also said that originally such information had been included but that it had removed "purely for reasons of space". Further, in the past, the paper had published a piece about Dykes on Mics, a point Ms Jamieson acknowledged.

The Council agrees that the newspaper had been fair and reasonable in its coverage of the concert. The complaint is dismissed.