Adjudication No. 1325  (adjudicated July 2006)

The Australian Press Council has upheld in part complaints from Allan Taylor that the Sunshine Coast Daily has been unfair to the local bus company, Sunbus, and the bus drivers employed by it.

At the heart of the complaints is the disappearance of a young boy, Daniel Morcombe, in December 2003. The newspaper has written in a number of articles, as recently as March 2006, that Daniel "disappeared from a bus stop ... and has not been seen since".

Mr Taylor says that the place was not a bus stop and, in fact, it was signposted to ensure that vehicles were prohibited from stopping there. He forwarded a letter from the Minister for Police that supported his assertion. Mr Taylor links the newspaper's reporting of the disappearance to other published material that mentions Sunbus in what he perceives as an unfavourable light. In particular he cites a court report about "a Sunbus driver" accused of Internet-related sex charges and a very long letter to the editor about a bus driver who allegedly failed to pick up a female passenger near a local supermarket. Mr Taylor notes the reference to the boy's disappearance in the published letter and that the accused in the court case had ceased to be a Sunbus employee by the time of his court appearance.

The newspaper has recognised part of the complaint by changing its reporting of the disappearance so that it now refers to the boy "waiting for a bus" rather than being at a bus stop. It rejects the wider aspects of the complaint, what it calls Mr Taylor's "conspiracy theories" about its reporting of Sunbus.

While the Council can find no evidence that the newspaper has unfairly singled out Sunbus and its drivers in its reporting, it finds that the reporting of the site of Daniel Morcombe's disappearance was, at best, careless. Further the newspaper has not explained in print the reason for the change of its description of the disappearance scene.

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