June - Media Monitoring BlogBy Daisy Cooper.Why would you identify someone in a newspaper (whether that person is an alleged criminal or a victim of a freak incident) as gay, trans, or as a traveller if that information was irrelevant to the story? And why would you create an impression that a group of people who share a particular characteristic all behave in a particular way, when in reality it is probably just a few individuals?Well, there is no good reason. And that’s why the Editors’ Code of Practice rules out both. Clause 12 (ii) states “Details of an individual’s race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story”, whilst Clause 1 (i) demands that “The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.”A decent regulator – independent from press and politicians, and effective for complainants – would be able to uphold these rules, both by being an independent arbiter of complaints and by pro-actively investigating code breaches that occur, even when complaints aren’t received or couched in quite the right language.Sadly for the public, editors routinely breach these rules and their fake regulator IPSO allow them to do so. Just look at the national newspapers in June.The Daily Star reported “The big British beggar rip-off” in which “Half of homeless really own house”. That’s right: the Star’s headline suggests that half of (possibly) all homeless people own a house.

This article deals with a serious social problem. On its website, Crisis – the national charity for single homeless people - cites government statistics that show 2,714 people slept rough in England on any one night during 2014 - a 55 per cent rise on 2010. But the problem is completely misrepresented by the Daily Star.The claim in the headlines derives from a survey of 52 beggars (not people claiming to be homeless) by a Nottingham charity. The survey did not show that half of these beggars “owned their own homes”. As the Nottingham Post report makes clear, it showed that 5 were sleeping rough, 16 staying with friends and family and 26 had their own homes (not “owned their own home”).Any member of the public would likely think that they could complain about this headline and receive – as per clause 1(ii) – a prompt and duly prominent correction. But they would be wrong. IPSO, the fake regulator, has already adjudicated that a misleading headline is ok, if it can be read “in the context of such an article”.Then there was a Daily Mail article by Richard Littlejohn in which he described transgender advocates as “fanatics”:“According to the new orthodoxy, people are allowed to self-define their gender. So if a man says he’s a woman, then the rest of us have to go along with it. There is no reasoning with these fanatics.”Backtracking quickly though – presumably to protect himself from any criticism from said “fanatics” - two paragraphs on and he claimed:“Look, I’ve written before that I support the right of the tiny number of people affected by gender dysphoria to receive treatment on the NHS. But…” [and then he goes on to talk about the welfare of a child involved in a complicated family legal case].Luckily for Littlejohn, the Editors’ Code – dominated by editors and presided over by the Daily Mail’s editor Paul Dacre – doesn’t allow complaints to be brought about pejorative references to groups (only to individuals). Neither do they allow complaints about pejorative or prejudicial references to physical appearance – unless it is an illness or disability. Even then it does not matter whether the NHS or medical Royal Colleges consider something – like morbid obesity – to be a physical illness or condition, IPSO conveniently does not.The Daily Mail also ‘informed’ us that a pair of criminals, who preyed on the kindness of an elderly couple, also happen to be travellers. That fact is not mentioned anywhere in the body of the story which occupies three quarters of a page yet it is the sole word used to describe the criminals in the headline. This irrelevant detail is also a clear breach of the Editor’s Code of Practice clause on discrimination.So, the evidence continues to stack up: a number of editors continue to break their own code of practice, and IPSO lets them get away with it.It’s an important part of our campaign for a proper press regulator – one that is independent from the press and politicians and effective for those who lodge complaints – that we show just how inadequate the current ‘regulator’, IPSO, actually is. Editors of IPSO’s member newspapers breach their own standards on a regular basis, and their complaints body IPSO – which sits in their pockets - is either unwilling or unable to act, in some cases going to extreme lengths to avoid upholding complaints.We intend to continue our work to call out these breaches of the Editors’ Code of Practice, and highlight the worst offenders as well as IPSO’s failure to act. We treat each article and newspaper on its own merit – after all, we wouldn’t want you to think that they’re all the same, that lot.