Adjudication No. 1392 (adjudicated June 2008) [2008] APC 13

Adjudication No. 1392 (adjudicated June 2008)

The Press Council has dismissed a complaint by Australians for Palestine against The Australian over its response to concerns with a bylined feature article published in its 19 January 2008 edition. The article (Deep inside the plucky country), written by foreign editor Greg Sheridan, sets out the impressions and personal reflections of Mr Sheridan arising from an extended tour of Israel he took in late 2007.

The complaint focussed in the main on two assertions in the article. The first was the statement 'Israel was more reported a few years ago, when terrorists were murdering 1500 of its citizens a year' while the second was that Israel 'was subject to thousands of rocket attacks from southern Lebanon until it went to war with Hezbollah'. The complainant said that these assertions were 'clearly false and inaccurate' and cited data which it said contradicted these assertions.

After representations from the complainant, and others, the newspaper published two clarifications from Mr Sheridan in which he amended the figures with lower estimates of 1100 deaths over five years from terrorism and "hundreds" of rocket attacks. The complainant has concerns with the accuracy of the figures in the clarifications, as well. Such disparity in estimates is characteristic of the debate about statistics in Middle-East affairs.

The complainant submitted a letter seeking to correct what it saw as inaccuracy and unfairness in the Sheridan article. The newspaper explained that it chose not to publish letters emanating from what appeared to it to be 'an organised writing campaign'. It chose, instead, to publish a letter from an Australian academic (Kylie Baxter) in the form of a bylined feature article, which provided some balance to the Sheridan article.

In addition to the concerns with statistics, the complaint offered different interpretations to Mr Sheridan on the events leading to the 1967 War and to the seizing of the Golan Heights in that war. These issues were not canvassed in the Baxter article.

The Press Council believes that on this occasion it would have been a reasonable exercise of discretion on the part of the newspaper to publish a letter from the complainant.