Adjudication No. 1257  (adjudicated October 2004; re-issued December 2004)

The Press Council has upheld a complaint by an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) correspondent against the Sydney Daily Telegraph over a bylined opinion column dealing with the aftermath of the killing of an Australian-born 15-year-old girl by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem.

The Piers Akerman column claimed that the correspondent, Tim Palmer, had revealed either "an appalling absence of any moral compass" or "a total lack of understanding of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict".

The killing occurred more than three years ago at a time when Mr Palmer was based in Jerusalem, and the article itself appeared more than a year ago. In the intervening years e-mails, letters and phone calls have passed between the girl's father, Arnold Roth, and Mr Palmer; the Federal member for Melbourne Ports, Michael Danby, and his staff joined the dispute; and the ABC managing director, Russell Balding, and Mr Roth himself had letters published in the Telegraph.

At the core of the dispute was an attempt by Mr Palmer to organise a feature story based on interviews with both Mr Roth and the father of the Palestinian bomber. At first Mr Roth agreed, but that was before he knew that the bomber's father was to be included in the story. Mr Roth was immediately outraged at what he regarded as gross insensitivity and an attempt to create a false symmetry between the two deaths.

Mr Palmer dropped the project.

The Piers Akerman commentary criticised Mr Palmer and the ABC's "babbling" about balance, asking: "Does it [the ABC] believe there can be some balance, some symmetry, some moral equivalence in presenting the father of a murdered teenager who spent her school holidays providing care for severely handicapped children and the father of a young man who believed it was his religious duty to murder innocent people?"

In his complaint Mr Palmer says that since the project was dropped, Mr Akerman could not possibly have known what form the story would have taken or how the two projected interviews would have been used.

Mr Palmer produced print-outs of two Daily Telegraph stories about the bombing that both appeared on page 5 on 11 August 2001. One quoted Mr Roth and included a picture of his daughter, Malki, "murdered by a fanatic who didn't know a thing about her"; and the other quoted the bomber's father as saying he was "filled with pride and sadness, and I will weep for him all my life."

This, says Mr Palmer, "is exactly the same scenario Mr Akerman suggests is without moral compass, and it is in his own newspaper".

Mr Palmer, who says he was on the scene of the bombing within five minutes, quotes a paragraph from the report he provided for the ABC programme AM a day later: "When the Islamic Jihad group first claimed responsibility for this blast, it described the action as heroic, but this was cowardly butchery. Indiscriminate in cutting down the old and the very young, it is believed as many as six of the dead are infants."

The Press Council believes that amid the arguments about the shades of meaning of the words "counterpoint", "balance" and "symmetry", it remains clear that Piers Akerman did not contact Mr Palmer, and indeed he could not have known how the story would have been handled. He had Mr Roth's side of the story, plus the extensive correspondence between the two.

The columnist was entitled to comment, even to comment strongly, on the question of the ABC's concept of balance. On this question the newspaper published a letter of rebuttal from the ABC managing director.

However, the Akerman commentary went further and singled out Mr Palmer for criticism. In the Council's view material clearly labelled as opinion has a wider licence than, for example, news reports. However, this is not an unfettered licence and columnists are still bound by the ethical requirement that they not publish what they could reasonably know is false, nor fail to take reasonable steps to check the accuracy of what they report. This is especially the case where there are no news reports on the same material in the newspaper. The published opinion was based on an assumption of the facts, without seeking any input from the ABC journalist. As a result, the article was unbalanced and unfairly derogatory of Mr Palmer, characterising him in a manner not justified by the matters raised in the column. For these reasons the complaint is upheld.

NOTE: Following an appeal from the newspaper, the Council reconsidered the matter at its December meeting. It decided to retain the finding but amended the last paragraph more clearly to explain its reasons.

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