IPSO upholds Angela Gibbins’ inaccuracy complaint in relation to Sun Online captions about a Facebook meme of Prince George
FOLLOWING publication of two online articles 26 July headlined “GEORGE & THE DRAGON Three-year-old Prince George hit by vile rant from British Council boss paid thousands by taxpayers to promote UK”, and “GEORGE'S DRAGON SLAYED £80k-a-year British Council boss who launched vile rant against Prince George is facing disciplinary action”, Angela Gibbins complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that The Sun breached Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.
The complaint was upheld, and IPSO required The Sun to publish this adjudication on its website.
The articles reported on Facebook comments the complainant had made about Prince George on a meme, created by someone else. The complainant’s comments in the thread below the meme related to Prince George, and “white privilege”.
However, the meme had the caption “‘Prince George already looks like a f****** d***head’”, and this complaint related to whether the articles, in their presentation of the story, claimed that the complainant had herself written the caption on the meme, in addition to making the comments it was accepted she had made in response to the post.
A picture caption in the first article stated that: “Troll with it…Angela Gibbins caused fury with her attack by saying ‘Prince George already looks like a f**** d***head’”. The complainant said that this was inaccurate; she had not created the meme, and had not called Prince George a “f****** d***head”.
An image of the meme in the second article was captioned “Facebook Troll” at the top, and “Facebook troll…Angela Gibbins posted the comments on a private Facebook page”, at the bottom. The complainant said that this inaccurately suggested that she was the “troll” who had posted the meme.
The newspaper accepted that the picture caption on first article was inaccurate, and said that the only explanation it could provide was that a sub-editor has misread the article. It said that when the British Council brought the mistake to its attention on the day after publication, it amended the caption to remove this claim.
During the IPSO complaints process, it offered to publish a correction and apology to the complainant on its website. The newspaper denied that the image of the meme in the second article was misleading.
The publication of the inaccurate caption in the first article was a failure to take care not to publish inaccurate information.
The newspaper had been aware of the inaccuracy since soon after the article was first published, and had amended the article accordingly.
However, the Code’s requirement that significant inaccuracies should be corrected is not met by simply amending an article.
While it subsequently offered to publish a correction and apology, the newspaper had failed to correct the article sufficiently promptly, and the complaint was upheld under Clause 1 (ii).
Furthermore, where the amendment that had been made to the online article was clearly relevant to the complaint, the Committee was extremely concerned that the newspaper had not brought this to the attention to either IPSO or the complainant until a late stage of the complaints process.
The presentation of the image of the meme in the second article clearly implied that the complainant had posted the meme to Facebook, which was inaccurate.
This represented a further failure to take care not to publish misleading information.
The publication had not offered to correct this, and the complaint was also upheld as a breach of Clause 1 (ii).
The Committee considered that the appropriate remedy to the breach of the Code was publication of this adjudication.