[Archived] Guardian article on Kean - unbelievable!

[Ozz]

Give it another 23 years and you might finally get justice Phil.

[philipl]

Give it another 23 years and you might finally get justice Phil.

Good point.

The PCC opinion is so ridiculous and the grounds for appeal so narrow, I fired this off to the Leveson Inquiry (which is still open to receive submissions):

Dear Lord Leveson,

I am writing regarding the conduct and fate of the Press Complaints Commission.

Within Blackburn there are extremely heated feelings throughout the community about the fate of Blackburn Rovers Football Club. A highly inaccurate article ostensibly reporting on the first game of this season appeared in TWO versions in the Guardian (both versions containing matters about which I complained to the PCC) which could easily have been fact checked using published financial accounts filed at Companies House and including incendiary derogatory descriptions of fans' protests about the running of the club and of the management by the previous (and universally admired) owners and Directors.

The article was so bad that it was named, attacked and factually corrected in a subsequent article written in The Times by the senior and highly respected journalist Oliver Kay. Andy Cryer, the Chief Reporter in the local Blackburn Newspaper, the Lancashire Telegraph, also ran a highly critical back page piece naming and correcting the Guardian article.

My complaint (reproduced from my submission in the large type) has been dismissed by the PCC as will be seen by the email I received which appears below my complaint.

My points of issue about the PCC's judgement, extracts from which are in quotation marks, are:

"Under Clause 1, “the press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information” and are free to print individual comment, so long as it is clearly distinguished from fact."

Quite apart from this being in this instance as a liar's charter, the caveat I have italicised which the PCC has chosen to append to Clause 1 to facilitate their dismissal of my claim does not to the best of my knowledge appear within the Press Complaints Commission Charter. How can I as a member of the public know that reporters are free to write factual untruths as "opinion" in what was published ostensibly as a report about a game of football?

The judgement goes on to state: "While the Commission understood the complainant’s concern, it had to consider that the disputed comments were made in the context of an online comment piece that was written in the first person." In neither version of the article do the words "I", "me" or "my" appear which for a non-journalist would be the normal indicators of an article being written in the first person. The two versions of the article were published under the sub-heading of "comment" but there was no other match report of the game published in the Guardian that day and the article included descriptions of the game. Although I submitted online copy to the PCC, the first version of the article did appear in the printed newspaper and I understand the amended version also appeared in a later edition. Therefore, any reasonable person would conclude they were reading a match report with factually accurate comment about the finances of a PLC and accurate reportage of post-match reaction.

I had previously been of a favourable opinion towards press self-regulation but I believe this mundane judgement demonstrates the Press Complaints Commission is totally unfit for purpose.

Yours sincerely,

[thenodrog]

PhillipL....... BulldogL

[Steve Moss]

Excellent work, Philip.

[John]

Great stuff Philip.

[SIMON GARNERS 194]

It appears the media witch hunt to portray Rovers fans as the 'wrong uns' and Teflon as the 'man of dignity' is in full flow again...this after all the shyte we have been through.

It just beggars belief!

[BlueMonday]

Our day will come.

[RoversSG]

Well done Philip, hopefully this can be published in some other papers (maybe some rival of the guardian might be interested). Then maybe, "journalists" would know that they can't write crap about small clubs without supporting evidence.