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Regional daily breached code in inquest report

A regional daily newspaper has been found to have breached the editor’s code of practice after typing notes for an inquest report directly into a computer.

Grieving mother Denise Brown complained over two articles in The Citizen, Gloucester, on the suicide of her son.

She claimed the March 2011 stories, headlined ‘Dog’s killer found dead’ and ‘Man who shoved dog off a cliff kills himself,’ contained a number of inaccuracies as well as intruding into her grief.

Although the Press Complaints Commission did not uphold the latter complaint, it did find a breach of the code in relation to accuracy.

The complainant said the inaccuracies included a claim that her son had “bragged” about the dog-killing incident, which took place in 2006, and that she had said he “wanted to get away from the Forest because he was becoming involved in the drink and drugs scene there”.

The newspaper argued that information about the man’s conviction for killing the dog was already in the public domain and had been mentioned in court proceedings.

However, it was unable to corroborate most of the information that had been challenged because the reporter’s notes had been transcribed directly onto a computer without retaining the original notes.

It offered to publish a correction addressing the points raised by the complainant, but this was rejected.

The Commission ruled that the “overall manner in which the newspaper had covered the inquest” raised a breach of Clause 1 (i) of the Editors’ Code, which covers accuracy.

It said that the errors about the complainant’s personal details, together with the newspaper’s inability to corroborate a quote attributed to the complainant, represented a lack of “sufficient care” taken by the newspaper.

Notwithstanding this, the Commission ruled that the newspaper’s offer of a published correction was a sufficient remedy to the complaint.

Stephen Abell, director of the PCC, said: “The Commission has made clear the lesson it expects the industry to take from this important adjudication: the need to retain contemporaneous notes as evidence for the accuracy of reporting.”