I’ve decided to publish my formal complaint to Stephen Rea, editor of the Evening Herald, here, further to this blog post and this article about the story. The offending article, by Cormac Looney, is here.
- My email two weeks ago to the Herald, with the subject line “Complaint to the editor about front page story on 11th July 2007 in the Evening Herald” has gone unanswered.
- The office of the Press Ombudsman has not been filled yet, and in an email this week I learned that this probably won’t happen till mid-Autumn. I was advised to take my complaint up with the editor. (See 1 above.) I have, nevertheless, written a full complaint as if the Press Council Code of Practice is currently enforceable, as if it will be the first thing in the new Ombudsman’s in tray, and used its headings to form the basis of my complaint.
- My purpose is to raise awareness of the dangers of inaccurate, simplistic, sensationalist reporting on a complex case, which is set to run and run. To this end, the more public this debate is, the better. As today there is news that Myspace in the US has revealed that there are 29,000 registered sex offenders on its books, it becomes even more important to separate fact from hysteria. (The Evening Herald story even made it to the Ritual Abuse Watch blog, which makes my point. There is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest any evidence of ritual abuse.)
Update: found some quality blog posts about how this story was seen back in March via Irishblogs.ie: Suzy, Tuppenceworth, ball*istic and Rob Synnott, as well as this perspective from gay.com.
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As the owner of the offending blog, Ritual Abuse Watch, I want to make clear that I made no inference of ritual abuse in the act of posting the article to the blog. Nor am I necessary condoning the content of an article, or the tone of its coverage, in the act of posting. The blog is a clearinghouse of articles on issues relating to ritual abuse (including organised sexual abuise), nothing more and nothing less.
For the record, I sympathise with your concerns over the labelling of a few men who made contact with a minor misrepresenting his age on Gaydar as a “paedo ring”. We’ll just have to see how the case unfolds.
Thanks B for your clarification.
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