Adjudication No. 1381  (adjudicated January 2008)

The Press Council has upheld a complaint by Timber Communities Australia (TCA) that The Mercury, Hobart, twice published inaccurate reports about old growth logging agreements.

The opening statement in a page three story, headlined Old-growth deadline faces axe, said that the Tasmanian government was "unlikely to meet a Tasmania Together deadline to end the logging of old-growth forests by 2010". TCA advised The Mercury that there was in fact no deadline to "end the logging ... by 2010", but rather one to end clear-felling. In fact the article noted "that clear-felling of old growth logging would end in 2010" in paragraph five. The Mercury published a correction of its opening statement two days later, on page 14 of its Friday edition.

A week or so later, in her 'Like It Is' column in The Sunday Tasmanian, the Sunday edition of The Mercury, Patsy Crawford, under the headline 'Tis fodder for the forest file, again referred to 2010 as the "Tasmania Together date to end old-growth logging". TCA complained to The Mercury that the Crawford item "repeats and increases the harm and hurt brought by your previously admitted incorrect and misleading statements".

The Sunday Tasmanian published a correction to the Crawford item in her column the following Sunday.

In correspondence with the complainant, The Mercury's editor stated that a memo had been sent to staff following the original error, but that Ms Crawford was not on staff, and it was a human error on the part of the sub-editor that failed to pick up Ms Crawford's repeating of the original mistake.

The prominence of the Tasmania Together agreements is such that The Mercury has no reasonable excuse for its original error about logging and clear-felling deadlines, and its subsequent repetition. The Press Council also requires that publications correct errors promptly, and with appropriate prominence, which the first correction clearly lacked.

[ return to top ]

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