The mother of a “teenage yob” who put a boy in a coma complained to the press watchdog after a regional daily used a picture from his Facebook page.
Joseph Kelly’s mum claimed the Manchester Evening News was wrong to use the picture and to make reference to the fact that some friends of his victim were Jewish.
The MEN named Kelly, pictured above left, and accomplice Zach Birch, both 17 at the time, and published photographs of them after District Judge James Prowse lifted reporting restrictions following their conviction over the attack.
Its story referred to comments made by the father of one of the victims and Bury South MP Ivan Lewis, both of whom argued that the case should have been treated as a religiously aggravated hate crime.
Kelly’s mother Tracey complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that the Manchester Evening News breached Clause 1 (Accuracy), Clause 2 (Privacy) and Clause 12 (Discrimination) of the Editors’ Code of Practice, citing a ruling made by Judge Prowse, in which he had stated that, while “throwaway” anti-Semitic remarks were made, the victims had not been attacked because they were Jewish.
The complainant also expressed concern that the image of her son included in the article had been taken from his personal Facebook profile. She said that at the time of publication, her son’s Facebook page had privacy settings in place.
The MEN responded that the inclusion of the comments from the victim’s father and Mr Lewis had been a matter of editorial discretion and denied they had given the impression that Kelly had been convicted of a religiously aggravated hate crime.
It said that its use of the word “Jewish” in the report was relevant to the extent that the issue of alleged anti-Semitism had been part of the investigation into the attack.
While the MEN was unable to provide an original screenshot of the Facebook page as it had appeared at that time, it said that the editorial team would not have been able to see or take the image if the page had not been open to view at the time of publication.
It provided IPSO with similar images taken from Kelly’s current Facebook page, which was publicly accessible.
IPSO found the MEN had accurately reported the offence for which Kelly had been convicted and that there had been no breach of privacy over the use of the photograph.
The complaint was not upheld, and the full adjudication can be read here.
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You’d have thought the mother of the scumbag thug would have been more concerned that he was capable of such a vision attack that could have ended in murder, rather than “shoot the messenger” over his photo being published. Incidentally, the little angel was locked up for 18 months while his accomplice got 12 months.
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Interesting question. Does anyone willing to stick their mug for people to see on Facebook have any right to privacy when it comes to using the picture?
Anyway the lout got all the publicity he deserved.
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This is one of the many potential pitfalls of scraping social media for news stories and pix and it leaves the publisher wide open to legal claims of unfairness, however in this case its hard to feel anything but utter revulsion for the thug and his mummy whos priority seems to be all about the little yobs rights rather than the fact that this yob committed the attack in the first place
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@paperboy: A right to privacy no, but the mother, or the son, could have claimed copyright over his picture.
If they took a picture from the page then they could, in theory, ask for payment.
incidentally, I worked for TM until about a year ago and all reporters had to sign a document noting that we were aware that it was against company policy to take pictures from social media without the expressed permission of the person concerned.
It came about after a paper took a shot from a dead couple’s page and it was their wedding shot, anyways it turned out that the copyright remained with the photographer who asked for, and got, over a grand for it.
Seems the memo didn’t make it to Manchester
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It is good to see IPSO batting away complaints such as this. Is it my imagination, or is the Code increasingly being used as some sort of grievance buffet, or complainers’ smorgasbord, from which Clauses are selected at random as a basis for objection? On the other hand, I suppose it shows that the Code does work – that it’s fast, fair and free. Even so, one does not have to read many adjudications to conclude that such radical notions as freedom of speech and a free press are beyond the comprehension of some. Perhaps, in the interests of accessibility, IPSO should commission some sort of “brass neck” emoji so that, where appropriate, correspondence on rejected complaints could be imprinted with, say, anything between one and five.
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If I want to communicate with someone I do it directly and privately and I don’t carry out my life on ‘social media’ – that name in it’s self says it all.
I find it hilarious how naive people are – the first place to visit with aany prospective employee is the social media – it is amazing what people make public.
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Desker. thanks. Very interesting comments. Does copyright apply to quotes taken from facebook? Of course if the story is big enough some papers with big wallets will lift and be damned.
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