A former football mascot who was photographed as a child with a young Wayne Rooney has had his complaint against a regional daily dismissed by the press watchdog.
Max Talavera accused the Liverpool Echo of launching a “witch hunt” against him and his family after it published the 1996 photograph and sought to establish his identity.
Mr Talavera, then aged 10, had appeared as the mascot for Liverpool FC in the Merseyside derby, in which an 11-year-old Rooney, the current England football captain, had undertaken the same role for city rivals Everton FC.
He complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that the Echo had breached Clause 3 (Privacy) and Clause 4 (Harassment) of the Editors’ Code of Practice in two articles published in September this year.
The 1996 photograph featuring Wayne Rooney, pictured front left in blue, and Mr Talavera, pictured front right in red
In the first article, the newspaper published the photograph, above, and asked readers to provide information about the complainant’s identity and what had happened to him.
In the second, the newspaper reported that a football programme collector had provided them with the match programme, which named Mr Talavera as the mascot. It reported the complainant’s name and said he was “believed to be from the Isle of Man”.
Mr Talavera said he had been aware of the first article, but chose to ignore it, before receiving two telephone calls from the Echo on his ex-directory telephone number, which he also ignored.
A member of the public had provided the paper with the complainant’s phone number, but the paper declined to identify the source because of its obligations under Clause 14 (Confidential sources).
After 24 hours, Mr Talavera contacted the newspaper to ask it to stop contacting him and to request that no information about him should be released, in an email which stated: “I am writing to inform you that if you contact me once more and/or release information about me, I will take every legal action that is available to me.”
Twenty minutes later, the complainant received a reply from the Echo, explaining that it was going to run a story about his appearing as a mascot with Wayne Rooney in 1996 and hoped he would share his memories of the football match for what would be a “lovely story”, adding he would not be contacted again if he did not wish to do so.
Mr Talavera later sent the Echo an email asking how it had obtained his phone number, to which the newspaper responded it was “unaware” of how it came by this information.
He expressed concern that the second piece had named him and reported the region in which he lived because the articles had been shared more than 1,500 times on social media and members of the public had contacted his family asking for information, which led him to close his social media accounts.
Mr Talavera said there was no public interest in the stories, and no consideration had been given to the impact that they and the newspaper’s “witch hunt” would have on him and his family.
He considered that as the newspaper had to launch a campaign in order to find him, the information was clearly private and not already publicly available.
The Echo said it was not its intention to upset the complainant, but to run a positive piece on the mascots at the match, and the second article was based on information given in the publicly available match programme.
The complaint was not upheld, and the full adjudication can be read here.
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A rather humourless response to what was a pretty innocuous bit of digging by the Echo. Glad his complaint was dismissed.
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Ex-directory? Isle of Man? What a precious person. Hope Big Louis hasn’t found him…
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Calm down, calm down!
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Typical manxer………..up hissen
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He sounds a right “money and misery”.
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And I guess you would have welcomed the repeated calls to your work, home and social media accounts?
Shocking invasion of privacy by the newspaper, especially when they’d been asked by their quarry to back off.
Looks like they see themselves as a law unto themselves, giving us all a bad name.
No wonder the public don’t co-operate when it really matters.
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Strikes me as the kind of claim to fame 95% of people would happily dine out on – quite why the individual falls into the other 5% only he can answer but he does seem pretty touchy about it all from reading the above.
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“Their quarry” – nice of you to join us from Victorian England!
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Dave, at least one member of the public did co-operate by providing the complainant’s telephone number.
A witch-hunt? Really? Aren’t we the ones who are supposed to hype things up?
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This fella needs to get over himself.
Would love to have been a mascot for Liverpool, particularly alongside Wayne Rooney, and I would still be talking about it today.
The honour was obviously wasted on him.
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The guy obviously has his own reasons for wanting to keep a low profile. And they may well be perfectly understandable reasons. But by getting so worked up about it and complaining the to the press watchdog he has gone and achieved the opposite of what he set out to do. Which is a tad foolish.
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