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Newspaper evicted from council meeting for fourth time in a year

A regional daily is taking legal advice after its reporters were evicted from a meeting of the local council for the fourth time in a year.

Witney Town Council – in the heart of Prime Minister David Cameron’s constituency – voted to exclude the Oxford Mail from a meeting this week on whether to sell a public hall to help pay for a town centre renovation.

The Mail has questioned the legality of the action by the council, which allowed a member of the public to remain in meeting after the press had been asked to leave.

In a strongly-worded editorial published yesterday, it branded the council “silly burghers” described its action as “an insult to democratic accountability,”

It was the fourth time the council has excluded Mail reporters from a meeting in the past year and now editor Simon O’Neill is planning to take the issue further.

He told HTFP:  “After four expulsions in a year, enough is enough. We are taking the matter further and are currently seeking advice on the next steps.

“We’ve never had any complaints about inaccuracy, just vague references to ‘misrepresentation’ and ‘commercial confidentiality.’

“We perfectly understand the latter, but in this case that is being used as a smokescreen to keep issues involving hundreds of thousands of pounds in taxpayer cash out of the public eye.”

In the latest eviction on Monday, the council cited concerns that the paper had ‘misrepresented things’ in the past, and refused to allow it to make representations on why it should be allowed to stay.

Councillors did, however, allow Terry Powell, a member of the public, to be present for some of the meeting.

Afterwards town clerk Sharon Groth said: “The committee doesn’t like to exclude but actually at times there is a need to discuss commercially-sensitive information that shouldn’t be out there at the moment.

“Mr Powell was allowed to stay as an advisory member and the committee agreed that decision.”

In its editorial, the paper said:  “Transparency is clearly a dirty word to the secretive folk who run Witney Town Council.

“Not for the first time, the town’s apparatchiks have slung our reporter out of a crucial meeting to discuss a proposal involving thousands of pounds of taxpayer cash, with little or no explanation.

“The vague excuse given this time was that the subject under discussion was of a confidential nature. It later emerged that the underlying reason was the council simply didn’t like previous stories we had run, possibly because they made them look like bumbling fools.

“In a democracy, that is not a bona fide legal justification for a public body to go into secret session.

“This is the UK, not North Korea and the wider public have a right to know what their representatives are doing on their behalf.

“What happened at the town’s council on Monday was an insult to the principles of local government and democratic accountability. The silly burghers of Witney should be ashamed of themselves.”

6 comments

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  • March 13, 2014 at 10:23 am
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    Disgrace. But as our industry shrinks, this is becoming an increasingly prevalent problem.

    In the area I cover, I have a coroner who holds inquests behind a locked door, often fails to advertise them in advance or advertises them at the wrong times, and fails to give out vital information – such as the deceased’s address – during hearings. This is all in breach of various laws concerning the coroner service, but the coroner isn’t remotely frightened of local newspapers’ complaints. She knows we have no power anymore. Complaints to the relevant ombudsman are dismissed on technicalities (‘We can only deal with complaints about coroners – this was a staff member’,etc) and we have no money or resources to launch a proper challenge.

    Elsewhere, every council/police/fire service/hospital press office I deal with insists that its press officers cannot be named in the paper. Several press offices insist on dealing with queries by email only. One local council recently told my editor he had to request the date of a council meeting under Freedom of Information, and only gave it out when my editor threatened to call the police (withholding that information is an offence under the Local Govt. Act, punishable by a fine in Magistrates Court).

    This is all happening because newspaper proprietors have put profits before principles. An ever-shrinking press has ever-shrinking power. Gatekeepers and spin doctors can ride roughshod over local newspapers now because none of us has the resources to allow journalists to really put the effort into exposing them. We’re all too busy churning press releases all day to make sure the paper doesn’t go out with empty pages.

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  • March 13, 2014 at 10:42 am
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    Reading about how organisations such as councils and football clubs are throwing their weight around with the media, I wonder if it’s because they know how weak and vulnerable local and regional newspapers now are. Or have these organisations always been this arrogant and obnoxious?

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  • March 13, 2014 at 11:31 am
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    I would say these organisations have always wanted to throw their weight around and the rise and rise of PR and news management is making them feel they can do it more and more.
    Also, in my experience, it is the smaller councils which are the worst. They tend to be filled with frustrated busybodies rather than sharp political operators and tend to have an overinflated sense of their own importance.
    We must fight them all the way.

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  • March 13, 2014 at 12:14 pm
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    Go and sort them out Simon. They have taken on the wrong person if they thought they would get away with such ridiculous behaviour. I wonder what they are REALLY trying to hide?

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  • April 2, 2014 at 8:58 am
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    Go and sort them out Simon. They have taken on the wrong person if they thought they would get away with such ridiculous behaviour. I wonder what they are REALLY trying to hide?

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