Updated – headline now corrected | Remember when The Sun was reprimanded by the Press Complaints Commission for muddling up the European Union and our local Court of Appeal in a story about a human rights judgment? You probably should because it happened just two weeks ago.
Well, despite telling the PCC that they would incorporate the issue into its staff training programme, The Sun has been at it again following yesterday’s European Court of Human Rights ruling on whole life sentences. The politics section of its website currently shows this on the sidebar:
And its Twitter feed (361,338 followers) shows this, when you click yesterday’s tweet:
The story itself is fine, in the sense that it correctly identifies the judges behind the ‘victory for evil’ as being those in the European Court of Human Rights, not the European Union. I understand that the physical paper version was also fine.
It is worth reminding ourselves of why the PCC reprimanded The Sun for the last mix up:
It is an important role of newspapers and magazines to publicise and analyse judicial rulings, but this public interest is served only insofar as such reports inform rather than mislead. While a headline, by its nature, can only ever summarise, it was inaccurate for the subheadline of the article to have attributed to the European Union responsibility for a decision by domestic courts based on the European Convention on Human Rights… This is a clear failure to take appropriate care over the accuracy of the coverage and a breach of the Editors Code, which was particularly significant at a time when the roles of both the EU and the Convention were a matter of major public debate.
Anyway, there it is. Plus ca change. In my post about the PCC ruling I offered The Sun to provide some training for them on these issues, and repeated that offer in an email to the management. I have as yet had no response.
If you would like to complain to the PCC, just click here.
Update, 18:28 - The headline has now been corrected, after I tweeted The Sun’s Political Editor.
@AdamWagner1 good point, thanks – i hadn't noticed. we will change asap.—
Tom Newton Dunn (@tnewtondunn) July 10, 2013
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Filed under: Criminal, In the news, Poor reporting Tagged: human rights
