THE TIMES OF LONDON let off a broadside on Saturday July 31 against Vladimir Putin with an article by Dominic Kennedy (no relation, please God!) and an editorial, and on Monday August 1st it followed with another article by Dominic Kennedy headlined “Putin TV channel twists the thinking of western viewers” plus another headlined “We must crack down on Putin’s lie machine ” by one Oliver Kamm.
By chance I was (again) trying to tidy my voluminous books, magazines and articles today when I found a photocopy of a piece from THE IRISH TIMES of 18 February 1982 which I quote in full –
“Britain’s Press Council has upheld complaints about a report in The Times of London saying that the IRA and its collaborators had killed 2,000 Protestants in
Northern Ireland.
The council said that after publishing the inaccurate statement six weeks elapsed before the newspaper printed a reader’s letter correcting the error.
One complainant had pointed out the inaccuracy to the editor on the day the article appeared.
‘The Press Council regards this as a most serious error of fact on a highly sensitive matter which should have been corrected at once in a more forthright manner’ the
judgement said.
The report, published on May 8 last year, covered the funeral of the H-Blocks hunger-striker, Bobby Sands, and a simultaneous ceremony to commemorate victims of
violence in the North held at the Cenotaph in Belfast by the Rev. Ian Paisley.
The report, written by Christopher Thomas, opened: ‘The Roman Catholics buried Robert Sands yesterday as Protestants lamented their 2,000 dead from 12 years of terrorism.’
It went on to say that while Bobby Sands’ place in Republican history was assured ‘the 2,000 victims of his collaborators will never be as famous.’
The complaints to the Press Council were made by Mr Donal Kennedy of London and Mr F.C. McDermott of Paris.
They protested at the failure of The Times to correct the error after informing the editor that it was fiction to suggest that the IRA had killed 2,000 people, let alone 2,000 Protestants. Mr Kennedy told the council that of about 2,100 killed during the 12 years of political violence ‘a very high proportion were Catholics.’
Each of the complainants said the newspaper had delayed both in admitting the error and in publishing the letter. Mr Kennedy provided cuttings from other newspapers and described the original report as ‘false propaganda.’ Mr McDermott suggested that the editor had been misled by reading too many of his own editorials,
Acknowledging Mr Kennedy’s letter, The Times said its correspondent had checked and confirmed his figure from several sources.
Mr John Grant, managing editor of The Times, told the council that the inaccuracy had not been apparent until after they answered Mr Kennedy. When it was, they thought
that publishing a letter would be better than printing a correction, being given more prominence. An earlier letter had to be discarded because it bore a false address. The newspaper felt that its erroneous report had now been adequately corrected.
The official figure of more than 2,000 deaths due to violence in Northern Ireland in the last 12 years includes civilians of all religions, members of the RUC, the British Army and the UDR.”
Comment to follow in a further BLOG.
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