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AWI Limited/The Weekly Times (no. 1518)
A complaint by the wool industry's peak body, AWI, that an article about aspects of its governance was inaccurate and misleading. The Council concluded that the description of recent re-arrangements contained a number of errors which, although not seriously misleading, needed to be corrected. Only some of them had been corrected by the newspaper prior to the adjudication. The complaint was upheld on that ground and the Council called on the newspaper to correct the remaining errors. The Council concluded that AWI had not established that the article’s account of a conflict of interest amongst directors, and the Board’s response thereto, was inaccurate or misleading. Accordingly, that aspect of the complaint was dismissed. Read the full adjudication.
Penny Campton/Northern Territory News (no. 1517)
A complaint that a front-page pointer to a court report of an incident that involved a single asylum seeker making a threat to kill Australians had erroneously referred to "asylum seekers" making the threats. The newspaper did not correct the error when it was pointed out to it, but offered the reader an opportunity to have a letter to the editor published. The Council concluded that it was a serious inaccuracy requiring immediate correction. A letter to the editor would have been insufficient. Accordingly, it called on the newspaper to take the remedial action which should have been taken at the time. Read the full adjudication.
Harshula/The Sydney Morning Herald (no. 1516)
A complaint about an article concerning the war between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE (Tamil Tigers). The description of an incident when Tamil leaders, allegedly under a white flag, were killed by government troops was said to be inaccurate. The Council concluded that the description was misleading and lacking in balance because, although saying a UN report rejected the government's version of some events during the period, it did not point out that the UN explicitly said it could not reach a conclusion about the white flag incident. The complainant also said the reporting of a named official was unfair by casting him as a likely war criminal yet not specifying any law he may have broken. The Council dismissed this aspect of the complaint because the official had been quoted extensively in his defence in a front-page article in the same edition. Read the full adjudication.
Jamie Benaud/The Daily Telegraph (no. 1515)
A complaint that three separate articles in June and July 2011 about aspects of the National Broadband Network were inaccurate. The complaint said that the first article understated the number of NBN customers taking up offers; the second misstated the costs of not taking up current NBN offers; and the third made misleading comparisons of the costs of connections. The Council upheld all three complaints on the basis that they were inaccurate and, in two cases, also misleading and unfair, and that the errors were not corrected promptly when brought to the newspaper's attention. Read the full adjudication.
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