Mr Tony Walsh and The Irish Times

The Press Ombudsman has decided not to uphold a complaint by Mr Tony Walsh that an article about school textbooks published in The Irish Times on 27 September 2012 was in breach of   the Code of Practice for Newspapers and Magazines.  Mr Walsh complained that the article breached Principle 2.3 of the Code because a current director of The Irish Times was a former director of the company about which the article was written.

The Irish Times stated categorically that the current director named in the complaint had no influence whatsoever on editorial policy, which was the sole preserve of the editor.

Commercial enterprises of all kinds continually vie for favourable editorial publicity in member publications of the Press Council. The decision to write about one commercial product rather than another, which will frequently be perceived by rivals or competitors as biased, is, in the absence of evidence of a breach of the Code of Practice, a matter for editorial discretion, the exercise of which frequently evokes disagreement. The complainant’s   belief that publication of the article in question breached the Code of Practice, no matter how strongly held, is not sufficient evidence of a breach of the Code.  

In the light of the newspaper’s categorical denial, and in the absence of any evidence that the editorial decision to publish the article under complaint had been inappropriately influenced by undisclosed interests, that there had been a failure to disclose any significant financial interest of an organisation, or that the writer of the article failed to disclose a significant potential conflict of interest to the editor, the complaint is not upheld.

5 December 2012

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