Adjudication No. 1318  (adjudicated June 2006)

The Press Council has upheld a complaint brought by General Peter Cosgrove, the former chief of the Australian Defence Force, against The Australian in relation to an article published on 23 December 2005.

The page one article, headed Cosgrove's AWOL son discharged from army, claimed that General Cosgrove's son, David, would be "discharged from the army after going AWOL from his barracks and being thrown into military jail". It accompanied a longer report discussing military recruitment.

The article also said that Philip Cosgrove, David's brother, was also leaving the army "of his own accord". It stated that neither General Cosgrove nor David Cosgrove could be reached for their comments.

Following General Cosgrove's complaint to the Press Council, the newspaper the next day published in The Weekend Australian an article headed Cosgrove goes into battle for army son. This article, drawing from General Cosgrove's letter of complaint to the Press Council, reported the refutation by General Cosgrove of a number of statements made in the newspaper article of 23 December. The second article also mentioned that the newspaper had published a letter by Army chief Peter Leahy that David Cosgrove "had applied for a discharge at his own request", and he had not been "administratively warned that he was unsuitable for service".

An overarching issue is the assertion by General Cosgrove that journalists 'have no licence to intrude willy-nilly into the life of people who are not public figures as they are caught up in everyday events'. The Council has in the past ruled that there are instances where the public interest justifies the reporting of family members of public figures in news articles. It maintains that position.

In this case there are such errors in the original article that the Press Council upholds the complaints of unfairness and inaccuracy. Some of the errors were answered in the follow-up article, but other unfair aspects of the first article remained uncorrected. In particular the juxtaposition of a photograph of Philip Cosgrove with the headline was unfair to him as it gives the impression that he had gone AWOL. The headline also suggested that David Cosgrove was 'thrown out' of the army because he had gone AWOL, when, as General Cosgrove clarified, the son had himself requested the discharge.

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