The Sunday Express has been censured by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) for a front page story claiming that prisoners were being allowed to have their own cell keys and roam at will inside jails.
The regulator decided that the article, headlined “Monsters are given their own cell keys” with a sub-deck “Ian Huntley and Rose West ‘virtually roaming at will’”, was inaccurate and that the paper’s original correction was inadequate.
It was therefore required to publish the decision by Ipso’s complaints committee, stating that a complaint against the paper for publishing a misleading story, had been upheld. The Sunday Express carried Ipso’s statement on page 2 yesterday (17 May), although I can’t find it online.
The original article, published on 25 January, claimed that 28,767 of 84,865 prisoners in custody at the time had keys to “privacy locks” on their cells.
Nicholas Black, who complained to Ipso, said that the headline implied that prisoners had been provided with keys which enabled them to enter or leave their cells at any time. This was not so because prison officers’ keys overrode the privacy locks.
The Sunday Express, having realised within days that its story was incorrect, published a correction in the following issue on its letters page, on page 30. It stated:
“In our article ‘Monsters are given their own cell keys’ on January 25, we said prisoners were ‘virtually roaming at will’ with keys to their own prison cells.
We would like to correct that and make it clear prisoners are given keys to be used to protect the privacy of their cells only at times when they are allowed out of their cells. Prisoners are not allowed to roam at will outside of these times”.
The complainant argued that it was insufficiently prominent, given the fact that the misleading story was the splash and turned to page 2.
The newspaper countered that when it became a member of Ipso it designated its letters page as the appropriate location for the publication of corrections and clarifications.
Ipso was having none of it. In its adjudication, it said: “While the committee welcomed the newspaper’s prompt recognition of the inaccuracy, the publication of the original claim nevertheless demonstrated a failure to take care not to publish distorted information”.
As for the placing of the correction, it said “there was no information published on the [letters] page which might indicate to readers” that it was the location for corrections. It concluded: “As such, the newspaper’s approach did not amount to an established corrections column”.
Source: Ipso