By Ed GarlandIn August 2023, I wrote a letter of complaint to The Cambrian News about this lie that appeared in a local Tory’s opinion column: ‘more young people have died from lockdown induced suicide than from Covid’. In the paper’s next edition, my letter appeared alongside another that also discussed the same column. But the piece of covid denialism I’d complained about continued to bother me in the weeks after the letter’s publication. Surely, I thought, that lie had breached the editorial code of practice. So I lodged a complaint with IPSO.As soon as IPSO had emailed the paper’s editor and I to see if we could come to a resolution ourselves, the editor asked for my phone number. I declined – I hadn’t requested a phone conversation, and since it wouldn’t have been recorded, I wasn’t sure if I could have used any of its contents as evidence in the proceedings. Then he pointed out that the offending lie had appeared in a column clearly labelled as opinion, and that he had already published my letter about it. I argued that he should also print a correction, because it is not possible to have an opinion on that particular claim about the proportion of young people who died of ‘lockdown-induced suicide’. There is no way to interpret the available data to support the claim – it is simply untrue. He then offered to print a correction that said ‘subsequent’ research revealed the claim to be false. This offer was hilarious because it would have obscured the basis of my complaint: the research that showed the claim to be false was already available at the time the column was printed. Why did he think I’d accept a correction that was itself incorrect?I asked the editor to print a correction that said the claim ‘was not true at the time and is not true now,’ and requested that he publish it adjacent to the writer’s next column in the paper. I didn’t think he’d agree to that placement, since it’s not standard practice, and sure enough he printed it in the usual ‘corrections and clarifications’ section. But I still like to imagine it’s possible for newspapers to demonstrate editorial integrity by making their corrections as prominent as their errors.If you read the IPSO ruling, you’ll see that sometimes I ‘did not respond’ to the editor’s emails. I’d started to doubt myself, fearing that I’d turned into the kind of person who writes to their local paper to be cantankerous about trivial things. But now, I’m glad I contacted IPSO to create a public record of the fact that the paper published this lie, and that the editor attempted to obscure the full extent of the error. The false claim was relatively small-scale but not trivial: it was a local part of the same truth-devaluing, trust-eroding behaviour that some government politicians and media figures engage in at national and international levels. I still don’t understand why we let them get away with it.Ed Garland is the author of Earwitness: A Search for Sonic Understanding in Stories, a collection of essays that consider what fictional sonic experiences can tell us about sound in everyday life. He is on Instagram @edgarland5000