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IPSO raps daily over failure to check paedophile doctor story report

FraserThe press watchdog has rapped a regional daily after finding the newspaper failed to properly check a report on which it based a story about a paedophile doctor.

But the Independent Press Standards Organisation dismissed claims the Belfast Telegraph had failed to contact the subject of a story for a comment, although it that the paper had failed to take further steps beyond sending a single email to the organisation in question.

IPSO upheld the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry’s complaint against the Bel Tel, which arose as the result of two articles published by the paper.

The first article reported that Dr Niall Meehan had claimed that the Inquiry had ignored his report which had found that child-psychiatrist Dr Roderick Morrison Fraser, pictured above left, had abused a 13-year-old boy, while the story also said the report had exposed “major failings by health boards, medical professionals and the RUC after they failed to stop [Dr Fraser] working within the health service”.

The second article was an opinion piece written by Dr Meehan, in which he said that the inquiry had undermined the evidence given by victims, who had not appeared before it, and had accepted testimony from police and intelligence sources without questioning it.

Complaining under Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice, the Inquiry said the Bel Tel had inaccurately asserted that it had “ignored” Dr Meehan’s submission on the allegations concerning Dr Fraser, adding there was a section of the report dealing specifically with one victim’s allegations about Dr Fraser’s conduct while he was in residential care.

It also denied it had “failed to reply to a request for comment”, claiming the Bel Tel had emailed the enquiry and been sent an out-of-office response.

The Inquiry questioned why the paper had made no attempt to contact the inquiry on the telephone number provided in that response.

The Bel Tel responded that it had not been aware that there were references to Dr Meehan’s submissions in the report, stating its reporter had searched the document for Dr Meehan’s name and nothing had come up.

However, it did not consider this to be significantly misleading because it was correct that the inquiry did not consider or investigate Dr Meehan’s report.

The newspaper denied it had received an out of office response and said that the reporter had emailed the complainant for its comment on Dr Meehan’s criticism of the inquiry and its report before publication, but it had failed to respond.

IPSO found he complainant’s report, which was the subject of the criticism, was publicly available at the time the newspaper published the articles and said it was concerned that the newspaper had failed to properly check the document before proceeding to publish the articles.

In addition, when it did not receive a response to its request for comment, it had failed to take any further steps to contact the complainant.

The Committee ruled the Bel Tel had failed to take care over the accuracy of the articles, but also found that because an attempt to obtain comment had been made, it was not significantly misleading for the paper to have stated in the first article that the complainant had failed to respond to a request for comment.

The complaint was upheld, with IPSO ruling the Bel Tel should publish the terms of its adjudication on page five, or further forward, in the newspaper.

The full adjudication can be read here.