22/4/22: Impress has upheld a complaint against the Waltham Forest Echo made by a freelance about her own article.
The freelance columnist, Michelle Edwards, said that the paper had distorted an aspect of her story when it edited a passage describing a tower block fire warden’s actions during a blaze.
Edwards had written that, according to an interviewee she spoke with, one warden “materialised, stood in the doorway and is said to have shouted the word fire and fled’.” The Echo edited the account to say that the interviewee “did recount seeing a warden raise the alarm as she left her flat but, when her fire alarm remained silent, she still felt the need to knock on her neighbours’ doors herself”.
Edwards said that this change of emphasis constituted an inaccuracy because it obscured an alleged dereliction of duty by the council-employed fire warden. The Echo said it had deliberately edited the passage because it had judged that those claims were “unsubstantiated defamatory opinions, from two anonymous sources, about someone performing their professional duties who had not given a right of reply”.
Impress ruled that the Echo breached clause 1.1 of the code (“publishers must take all reasonable steps to ensure accuracy”) because “if the publisher had any doubts as to the accuracy of the statement or the risks involved by its inclusion in the article, it should have taken further steps before deciding to publish the article at all”. Full ruling here.
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