Adjudication No. 1422 (adjudicated May 2009) [2009] APC 9

Adjudication No. 1422 (adjudicated May 2009)

The Australian Press Council has upheld a complaint by the parents of a schoolboy against two reports and an editorial about alleged bullying at Sydney's Moriah College published in the Australian Jewish News (AJN) on November 28, 2008.

The newspaper reported that a male student of Moriah's middle school had been kicked in the head and a mobile phone video of the incident had been placed on the internet social network site, Facebook. The article said the video portrayed other students standing by and laughing at the plight of the student being bullied. Two students were suspended.

The school subsequently sent a letter to parents clarifying that the students had been suspended for what it termed "cyber-bullying".

The AJN in its next edition sought to correct errors of detail in the original article and reported what it called a "partial back down" by the school by its reference to "cyber-bullying" rather than physical bullying. In the same edition, it carried a detailed feature article on bullying in schools.

The parents of one of the suspended boys said the newspaper breached Press Council principles in that the articles were not accurate, errors were not corrected, they were denied a balancing response in the original article, they were misrepresented and that information for the first article was obtained by unfair means.

The newspaper said that it relied in the original article on the school's acting principal's statement and believed at the time that the suspension was due to physical bullying.

The newspaper did publish follow-up material at the first opportunity. Nonetheless, the original article was inaccurate in its description of the incident that led to the suspensions, and unbalanced as a result of the absence of material from the parents, and the follow-up material did not provide adequate balance.

Bullying in all its forms is a serious problem schools across Australia. The AJN raised many important issues in its original article, its editorial and in the article and feature it published a week later, but it failed to meet its obligations to ensure accuracy and balance.