The Sun correction
Categories: Latest News
Saturday March 26 2016
In the interests of transparency and for full disclosure to the nearly 3,000 people who complained about The Sun’s front page story last November, ‘1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis’, and The Times article on the same, we are publishing all our correspondence with The Sun and The Times via Ipso.
We thought the many other individuals who complained alongside us might be interested to read the respective newspapers’ defence of their stories and the ruling by Ipso as revealed to us in February.
The Sun had today published a correction to the story as required by Ipso’s ruling on our complaint about a Clause 1 breach (Accuracy).
But there are a few other matters that ought to be considered alongside the regulator’s ruling that The Sun story was ‘significantly misleading’:
We learnt of Ipso’s decision on February 17 but received no clear guidance from the regulator as to when its decision or the newspaper’s ‘remedial action’ would be published.
It was one of the criticisms levelled at the defunct Press Complaints Commission that corrections or apologies proceeded long after the fact and were rarely commensurate with the damage done by the initial article.
We would therefore question the validity of allowing corrections to be published during major holiday periods. The Sun boasted of its newspaper front page in November on a weekday. Is it fair to allow the correction to follow in a weekend edition of the paper during a long holiday weekend? We invite readers to consider these matters. The letter links are below:
Ipso’s letter to mend, 17 February 2016
The Sun Letters
mend, 23 November 2015
The Sun, 4 December 2015
mend, 11 December 2015
The Sun, 16 December 2015
mend, 24 December 2015
The Sun, undated
The Times Letters
mend, 24 November 2015
The Times, 27 November 2015
mend, 27 November 2015
The Times, 27 November 2015
mend, 30 November 2015
The Times, undated
mend, 15 December 2015.