Adjudication No. 1409  (adjudicated October 2008)

The Press Council has upheld a complaint that The Australian incorrectly implied that the fatal bashing of a young Sudanese student in Melbourne was at the hands of a Sudanese gang.

The complaint, from a prominent Sudanese community leader, Clement Deng, concerned the death of Liep Gony, 19, who died the day after he was attacked near Noble Park railway station, on September 26, 2007.

The Australian's report, six months later, on March 25, 2008, stated, "Sudanese gang violence escalated last September with the fatal bashing of 19-year-old Liep Gony ..."

The wording implies that his death arose from Sudanese gang violence yet, on October 3, 2007, just one week after Gony's death, two Caucasian men were extradited from Adelaide and charged with his murder.

The newspaper then ran another report on April 16, 2008 as well as a feature article the same day, which said in part: "... following a spike in crime among young Sudanese men that escalated last September with the fatal bashing of 19-year-old refugee Liep Gony ...". Once more the suggestion is that Gony's death was caused by violence involving groups of Sudanese men. Neither of the two reports included the obvious clarification that two non-Sudanese men had been charged with Gony's death.

To the extent that the reasonable reader would infer that Sudanese gangs were involved in Gony's death, the complaint is upheld.

Mr Deng said the newspaper's reporting had caused immense grief to the Sudanese community. His general complaint was that the reports were erroneous and contravened the Council's principle that publications should not place any gratuitous emphasis on race or country of origin. He broadly accused The Australian of lacking balance in its coverage of the Sudanese community.

The Australian agreed that the men who were accused of killing Mr Gony were not Sudanese. The paper said, however, that in the highly charged aftermath of Gony's death, Sudanese at a wake were involved in an incident in which a policeman was badly beaten, resulting in a Sudanese youth being sentenced to a year's detention. The paper submitted evidence that Gony's death had occurred during a period of ethnic violence between Pacific Island and Sudanese gangs although Victorian police commented that Sudanese migrants were well down on the list of law breakers.

The paper provided material published over many months to argue that it had been overwhelmingly sympathetic to the plight of Sudanese refugees. However, the feature article of April 16 conveys the unmistakeable impression that Sudanese refugees are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime in Victoria.

The Council concluded that The Australian's reports were generally balanced but reminds publications that offence is magnified when misleading implications occur in their coverage of such sensitive issues.

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