Temple Bar Cultural Trust and the Evening Herald

The Press Ombudsman has decided that although an article about the Temple Bar Cultural Trust in the Evening Herald on 26 September 2011 was inaccurate, this was not significant enough to amount to a breach of Principle 1 (Truth and Accuracy) of the Code of Practice for Newspapers and Magazines. He also decided that there was insufficient evidence that the article in question breached Principle 2 (Distinguishing Fact and Comment) of the Code.

The article, headlined “Now they want to axe cobbles in Temple Bar” was based on an online interview (not identified in the article and later removed from the web) with the Chairman of the Temple Bar Cultural Trust by a third party. The Chairman was reported as stating, inter alia, “We have another idea that is going to take about five years and cost around 12 million euro…we want to make all of Temple Bar fully accessible: to restructure all the cobblestones ….”

The Chief Executive of the Temple Bar Cultural Trust complained that the use of the word “plan” by the newspaper in its report of his “idea” was inaccurate and untruthful. He maintained that there was, in his view, a vital and substantial distinction between an “idea” and a “plan”, and also that the interview on which the report was based did not disclose any intention to do away with the cobblestones. The newspaper stood over its report of the interview.

The conflation of “plan” and “idea”, and the statement in the headline that the Trust would “axe” the cobblestones, instead of “re-structure” (the word used in both the online interview and in the body of the article itself ) were both inaccurate, although not significantly so. The complaint under Principle 1 is therefore not upheld.

This was an example of a complaint about press coverage that could have been resolved expeditiously - without the involvement of the Office of the Press Ombudsman - if the complainant’s initial response to the article (which was to demand a full retraction, a published correction, and a prompt and prominent apology), had been less stark, and if the publication concerned, in response, had been prepared to accept that the complainant should have been offered a reasonable opportunity to correct the inaccuracies, even though they did not amount to a breach of the Code.

The Press Ombudsman also decided that there was insufficient evidence that the article was in breach of Principle 2 of the Code of Practice.

It was not possible for the Press Ombudsman to decide on the accuracy or otherwise of a statement in the article that a confidential consultants’ report had said that “the Trust should be scrapped within three years”, since the report was confidential and was therefore unavailable to the Press Ombudsman.

A further complaint about a statement in an article published on 29 September that incorrectly identified the author of the confidential consultants’ report was resolved between the newspaper and the person named as the author.

9 February 2012