A regional daily has apologised to a council leader for misquoting her in a front page headline.

Brighton daily The Argus said sorry after Brighton & Hove City Council complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation over a splash involving the authority’s leader Nancy Platts.

The front page in question featured the headline ‘We can’t cope’ in quotation marks and also included a photograph of Councillor Platts.

The splash prompted the authority to complain to IPSO under Clause 1 (Accuracy) and Clause 12 (Discrimination) of the Editors’ Code of Practice on the grounds that Cllr Platts had not used the phrase “we can’t cope” in a quote attributed to her which it had supplied to the newspaper.

The council added two former male Brighton and Hove City Council leaders, have also issued comments about the challenges and struggles faced by local government due to cuts.

But it questioned why the paper had characterised only Cllr Platts as using the phrase “we can’t cope”, which in the council’s view was a statement “often levelled at women in positions of authority to cast their abilities in a negative light.”

Denying a breach of Code, The Argus accepted that the councillor had not said “we can’t cope” exactly but said that including this within quotation marks in the headline was not significantly misleading.

The newspaper added “we can’t cope” was a characterisation of the fact that the council was “struggling” to “do the basics well” and added its use of the phrase had no relevance to the fact that the council leader was a woman.

However, it published a correction on page three which contained an apology for misquoting Cllr Platts and an acknowledgement it should not have happened.

The council initially said in response that it did not believe the correction would resolve its complaint because the quote had appeared on the front page headline, and it did not believe that the third page was prominent enough.

During the course of IPSO’s investigation The Argus offered for Cllr Platts to write an opinion piece for the publication in order to reinforce the council’s point further, which resolved the matter to the authority’s satisfaction.

The full resolution statement can be read here.