Dwyer Family and the Sunday World

Complaint

A complaint was received from a representative of the Dwyer family about an article published in the Sunday World on 21 June 2009 reporting on events associated with the death of their son, Michael, in Bolivia two months earlier. The family complained that the re-publication in this article of the front page of a foreign newspaper “El Mundo” which showed the body of their dead son was in breach of Principle 5 (Privacy) of the Code of Practice.

The newspaper responded that it did not accept that it breached the Code of Practice. It stated that it had published the front page of “El Mundo” on a previous occasion, that it had re-published it as an aide-memoire for readers, and that it was at all times conscious of situations of personal grief and shock.

Decision

Principle 5.3 requires that in publishing information in situations of personal grief or shock, the feelings of grieving families should be taken into account. The re-publication, two months after the event, of a fully recognisable image of Mr Dwyer, partially unclothed and fatally wounded, and taken in the immediate aftermath of his death, plainly failed to take the feelings of the late Mr Dwyer’s grieving family into account.

The newspaper’s sole argument - that readers needed to see this image as an aide-memoire - is not sufficient justification for its unnecessary re-publication at this remove in time from the original event and regardless of its effect on the bereaved. The re-publication of the photograph of Mr Dwyer therefore amounted to a breach of Principle 5.3.

The family made two further complaints. They complained under Principle 3 that the newspaper had failed to publish an appropriate caption to a photograph of their son during an Airsoft game. They also complained that the publication of a photograph of part of their son’s passport was a breach of Principle 5 in that the photographed section included personal information about another family member.

While it would have been preferable that the Airsoft photograph had been accompanied by an explanatory caption, this was not an omission of sufficient gravity to constitute a breach of Principle 3. The Press Ombudsman accepts the newspaper’s contention that none of the information about another family member could be deciphered from the passport image as reproduced. The complaints in relation to both these Principles are therefore not upheld.

23 October 2009