A Family and the Sunday World

The Press Ombudsman has decided that a number of inaccuracies in an article in the Sunday World about a man who had been murdered amounted to a breach of Principle 1 (Truth and Accuracy) and 4 (Respect for Rights) of the Code of Practice for Newspapers and Magazines.

The complainant complained on behalf of the family of the deceased that a number of statements reported as fact about the deceased man and his family circumstances were untrue. The newspaper, while saying that its reporters stood over their story, accepted that they “may have been given inaccurate information on a few details.” On the evidence available, however, a number of demonstrable, basic factual errors in statements made in the article about the deceased and his family, the apparent absence of any attempt to verify such information from authoritative sources, and the publication’s failure to acknowledge or respond to a letter from the complainant pointing out these errors, are sufficient to support a decision that in this respect the article breached Principle 1 and Principle 4 of the Code of Practice respectively. This part of the complaint is therefore upheld.

The complainant also complained about a number of other statements of a pejorative nature about the deceased. As these statements were attributed in the article to unnamed Gardaí and/or directly or by inference to anonymous “sources,” it was impossible for the Press Ombudsman to establish if they were true or not.

A complaint made under Principle 5 about the effect of the article on the privacy of another family member was not upheld because it was not accompanied by sufficient evidence that the privacy of the family member concerned had been affected in a manner that would amount to a breach of the Principle concerned.

9 December 2010

The Family appealed the decision of the Press Ombudsman to the Press Council of Ireland.