Adjudication No. 1159 (February 2002; re-issued May 2002)

Note: After receipt of an appeal from the Canberra City News, the Council reconsidered this matter at its May 2002 meeting and decided to retain the finding, upholding the complaint. However, the Council also decided to delete one paragraph from the adjudication, dealing with the newspaper's handling of the complaint subsequent to publication of the column.

The Australian Press Council has upheld in part complaints about a column article in the Canberra City News on Muslim migrants, the proliferation of serious crime in Australian communities and the incitement of religious violence.

Separate complaints against an anonymously authored column, The Whip, were lodged by Michael Cove and Mark Dossetor. They argued that comments contained in the column were based on inaccuracies, that they were racist and were liable to incite hatred.

The Whip is a provocative, fast-paced column that rounds up newsworthy items of national and local interest. Its style is to string together many individual topics, and to intersperse that with commentary.

The item complained about was published in the lead up to last year's Federal election and focussed partly on political and community issues regarding refugees. It asserted that Muslim migrants have "not turned into easy going Australians". It went on to link the rescue of asylum seekers by the Tampa with "the disclosure that an epidemic of pack rapes of Australian Christian girls is at crisis point in parts of Sydney". It continued by saying that "four men in balaclavas threw petrol bombs" through the windows of a Canberra synagogue in an attempt to kill 100 people in the building, and added that "imams preach inflammatory sermons in the Australian mosques".

While Press Council principles apply equally to all newspaper articles, opinion pieces such as The Whip are given greater leeway to express the writer's point of view. In using this freedom, however, it is fundamental that such pieces not be based on comments and views offered as facts. This requirement is heightened when comments are made about events that are capable of inciting strong community emotions and actions based on religion or race.

The implication that Muslims were involved in the synagogue bombing (when no charges have ever been laid over the incident, and the identity of the perpetrators remains unknown), taken in conjunction with the linking of the "epidemic of pack rapes" with the Tampa incident and with the preaching of imans, placed an unfair, gratuitous emphasis on a group within Australian society. To this extent, the complaint is upheld.

The Council believes that newspapers have the right to publish a variety of strong and provocative views, even if readers are offended in the process. That right should not be abused, however, by the publication of emotionally charged commentary based on surmise.

return to
Adjudication index

[ return to top ]

Documents with the icon require the Acrobat Reader, a Free Utility from Adobe. Click here for more information.