Press Ombudsman urges journalists to ‘up their game’

Journalists risk becoming increasingly irrelevant and losing readers' trust by failing to maintain standards of fairness and accuracy, the Press Ombudsman has said.

Peter Feeney said citizens had access to far greater information than ever before, and journalists should see this not as a threat but as an incentive to "up their game".

They should “strive to get it right”, to present their readers with all the relevant information and to do so in a fair and clear manner, he said.

“[Journalists] should not rush to judgment before assessing all the relevant information and viewpoints. They should try to keep their personal views separate from their critical assessment of what is relevant to stories.”

If they failed in this task, journalists risked “becoming increasingly irrelevant as they lose the essential trust with their readers, which fundamentally cements the relationship between the journalist and the public”. If readers no longer believed what they read in the papers, he added, they would go elsewhere.

Inaccurate reporting

Mr Feeney was speaking at the publication of the annual report of the

Press Council

and the Office of the Press Ombudsman. It showed about a third of complaints received last year cited inaccurate reporting.

The report showed privacy concerns accounted for one in 10 complaints last year. Mr Feeney acknowledged the media faced a “difficult call” in balancing the public’s right to know and the individual’s right to privacy, but said editors had to carefully consider whether the public interest justified publishing information that might otherwise be regarded as private.

“This consideration does not just apply to the private citizen, it also applies to the person in public life,” he said.

“Participating in public life does not mean the abandoning of all rights to privacy, and indeed the code of practice [for newspapers and magazines] clearly states that public persons are entitled to privacy. But clearly there may be aspects of a public person’s life that are more open to scrutiny than a person who does not seek any involvement in public life.”

Principle cited

Of 350 complaints received last year, 41 were decided by the ombudsman, 20 were satisfactorily resolved and 16 remained live at the end of 2014. A further 150 were not pursued by the complainant and 111 were outside the ombudsman’s remit, while a small number were withdrawn or postponed due to legal proceedings.

The principle cited most commonly by complainants was prejudice (32 per cent), followed by truth and accuracy (29 per cent) and privacy (8 per cent).

One in eight complaints referred to children, and Mr Feeney said that since taking office last September he had dealt with a number of cases on children’s privacy.

"With the growth in usage of digital media such as Facebook and Twitter, more and more personal information and comment on and by children is easily accessible. Journalists must not take the view that just because information about children is available digitally it can be published in newspapers and magazines unilaterally," he said.

Speaking at the event, Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald said the ombudsman and the Press Council had an important role to play in providing guidance and generally promoting high standards. This was at least as important as managing complaints, she said.

The chairman of the Press Council, Daithí Ó Ceallaigh, said its code of practice had been amended to add a requirement that “in the reporting of suicide, excessive detail of the means of suicide should be avoided”.

Mr Ó Ceallaigh said he hoped this would achieve a greater awareness among editors and reporters of the need to be careful in how they reported on suicide.

Of the 350 complaints last year, 229 related to national newspapers, 39 concerned regional papers and 10 involved online news publications. Just one complaint referred to a magazine.