Was Ipso the reason for the Daily Mail's climbdown over inaccuracy?
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Version 0 of 1. I noted an interesting item in the Daily Mail’s “clarifications and corrections” column on Thursday. It stated: “An article on July 30 described the late IRA leader Joe McCann as a ‘notorious killer’. In fact, he was never arrested for or charged with such an offence. We are happy to set the record straight.” So I looked back to the Mail’s issue of 30 July to read the original story, which concerned a former paratrooper, identified as Soldier C, who is facing prosecution for the shooting McCann to death in 1972. McCann, a member of the Official IRA, was unarmed and shot in the back. He was improperly described as a killer. That killer reference has now been removed from the online version of the story, which carries a note at the foot of the article in similar terms to the one published in the newspaper’s print edition. I note from the Facebook page of the Pat Finucane Centre that the Mail’s climbdown followed complaints from McCann’s family and involved “several weeks of to-ing and fro-ing.” That doesn’t surprise me because the Mail is renowned for its desire to avoid correcting or apologising. Although the paper doesn’t say sorry, the brief paragraph is about as close as it ever gets to doing so. But there is another issue here, and that is the unsung influence of the existence of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso). My hunch is that the Mail decided to bow to the family’s will because it did not want to face what surely would have been a negative ruling by the regulator. There wasn’t a scintilla of evidence to support its description of McCann as a killer. It was a gross factual inaccuracy and therefore very upsetting to his surviving family. It should not have required much to-ing and fro-ing for the Mail to have done the right thing, although I can well imagine what happened. After the initial complaint, the paper would have stood by its story. Only when that stock defence was no longer tenable did it realise it would need to agree terms. Although that isn’t necessarily in the spirit of press regulation, it says much for its desire to avoid censure by Ipso that it acceded to the family’s request. In such circumstances, as the Pat Finuncane Centre remarked: “It’s not often that a bereaved Irish family takes on one of the mightiest of the British press corporations and wins.” Ipso was their silent helper. |