Adjudication No. 1442 (adjudicated October 2009) [2009] APC 29

Adjudication No. 1442 (adjudicated October 2009)

The Australian Press Council has upheld a complaint from former footballer Greg Smith that a July 20, 2009 article in The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, was unfair, in repeating inaccuracies about his football career that had been corrected ten years earlier.

In the wake of the Karmichael Hunt decision to switch to AFL, the newspaper ran a story about other footballers who had switched codes, concentrating on Mr Smith, who had played one first grade game for the Newcastle Knights in 1999. The newspaper's sister paper, The Sunday Telegraph, had previously covered Mr Smith's career in an article in March 1999, when it had contacted US sports journalists and the Philadelphia Eagles NFL club to confirm the footballer's bona fides.

Following an approach from Mr Smith, The Sunday Telegraph had published a follow-up story a week later that clarified that Mr Smith had played several trial games for the Eagles as an unsigned free agent, but had not been contracted by the club for the regular season.

When The Daily Telegraph revisited the story in 2009, it asserted, among other things, that "no one at the Eagles [had] ever heard of him". Mr Smith complained that the 2009 article revisited matters that had been corrected in 1999 and that the newspaper refused to correct the record on this occasion. He also complained that various references to him in the article were demeaning.

The newspaper defended its report, relying on the 1999 conversation that Mr Smith had had with its reporter. In an attempt to settle the matter at mediation, the newspaper offered merely to correct its electronic archive so that the assertions made by Mr Smith about his NFL career would be included, but not to publish a correction or clarification. Mr Smith insisted on a published correction.

The Council considers that the newspaper was entitled to revisit Mr Smith's story but had an obligation to get it right, taking into account material that had led to the 1999 follow-up story. There was no basis for the assertion, as the newspaper's own archive demonstrated. When it was brought to its attention, the newspaper should have corrected this inaccuracy in print and with due prominence.

The Council finds that the newspaper has been grossly unfair in reviving an inaccurate story about Mr Smith in such derogatory language.