The Sheffield Star received 110 complaints after publishing a reader’s letter describing students campaigning for Palestine as “brainwashed”.
Although many of the complaints described the letter as “offensive and Islamophobic”, regulator the Independent Press Standards Organisation ultimately found the newspaper to be in breach of accuracy rules under the Editors’ Code of Practice.
The letter, published on the Star’s “Your Views” page on 12 June and signed off by the reader’s name and first part of their postcode, stated that Palestinians “are Muslims and unfortunately whichever way you look at this the majority in the world are conflicts caused by Muslims. This is not racism it is absolute fact.”
IPSO said the newspaper “had not taken any steps to verify or challenge this information – for instance, by setting out the factual position elsewhere, or publishing a letter on the same day disputing this claim.
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“This amounted to a failure to take care not to publish inaccurate information…” It ruled this was “significantly inaccurate” and in breach of the Editors’ Code.
The Star accepted that the letter was “inaccurate and offensive” and that publishing it was a “grave error”.
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According to IPSO’s ruling, the Star explained that readers’ letters are all “reviewed and fact-checked by experienced and qualified staff members” but that “on this instance these checks failed in what it described as a regrettable lapse of standards”.
Before the Star had heard from IPSO it published an apology and letters from several other readers in response to the original submission in the next edition of the newspaper.
The apology said: ““We would like to sincerely apologise for a letter about student campaigns which appeared in The Star yesterday. We fully accept that the publication of the letter was a serious misjudgement and we are deeply sorry.”
IPSO said that as a result there had not been a further breach of the Code, which states inaccuracies should be corrected “promptly and with due prominence”.
The Star also said it had written back to every individual who complained, on the same day their complaints were received where possible, and that the editor and print team responsible for the letter being included were “spoken to at length about the matter”.
Read the full IPSO ruling here.
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