A statistic which does not generate local pride. Out of the twenty-nine complaints adjudicated by the Press Council of Australia so far this year, NSW North Coast newspapers have featured twice.
February 2010:
The Australian Press Council has upheld a complaint by SANE Australia against a bylined article and two pictures in the weekend edition of The Tweed Daily News of August 22-23, 2009......While there was a clear public interest in the publication of the report about a missing man, and the search for him, there was no justification for the publication of the photos in a form that clearly identified the man and did not adequately respect his privacy and sensibilities. Because it knew a mental health assessment was being made, the newspaper should have been more cautious in the way it treated the incident, including publication of the bylined article, which could have been written more sensitively.
March 2010:
The Australian Press Council has upheld a complaint by Douglas Baggaley against The Northern Star, Lismore, over an article arising from the funeral of his mother.The December 30 article, headed Baggaleys miss Byron funeral of grandmother, reported that her two grandsons who were in jail did not attend. Half the article detailed the convictions of the grandsons for crimes committed in 2007.
Mr Baggaley said that the article belittled his family at a time of deep loss and had outraged and insulted the family, their friends and the community. He demanded an apology from the newspaper......
However the Council believes the newspaper erred in gratuitously highlighting the grandsons and their criminal records at such length and in such detail that the article was clearly unbalanced and, as a result, unduly offensive to the family, in a time of grief. The newspaper's failure to print any public expression of regret exacerbated the offence.
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