Dear Bono....

The following cases are examples where news omission has not been upheld by the various press councils of the world. This means they are complaints in which the press councils have disagreed that news mediums have unethically left out information or completely omitted a worthy news story from an edition. To reiterate what has been mentioned in the initial prologue of this book, the over-representation of Australian cases must be acknowledged. Being an Australian, I have taken considerable interest in the cases that have taken place in my home-continent. But I have also researched many news omission complaints that have taken place throughout the world. What I hope to achieve from this chapter, is provide a supplementary illustration of how press councils throughout the world have dealt with complaints against news omission and discuss how these adjudications have been justified. The introduction to the content might sound particularly insipid; however, I have tried to include some of the more interesting cases to avoid total tediousness.

The first case is an instance where the Sydney Morning Herald has failed to include a news story on a protest rally over new gun legislation. The complaint reads as follows:

Australian Press Council (September 1988)

Adjudication No. 377

Mr George Krooglik complains concerning the failure of the Sydney Morning Herald to report a large protest rally attended by many thousands of people in Melbourne on 30 January 1988 on proposed new gun legislation.

Mr Krooglik says that he cannot understand how one of Australia’s largest protest rallies since the days of the Vietnam war could be totally omitted by one of Australia’s largest newspapers. "The inference one could reasonably draw from such an omission could be that it was deliberately omitted because of the then NSW government’s proposed gun legislation and that publishing such an event in another state could harm the NSW government electoral chances in the forthcoming election."

Mr Krooglik has provided copies of newspaper articles reporting the protest march in The Age, The Australian, the Melbourne Sun and the Sun-Herald.

Mr Krooglik also complains that the Herald did not reply to a letter sent to it. The Editor-in-chief did ask the Press Council to pass on his apologies to the complainant for the Herald’s failure to respond but as far as the Editor-in-chief could find out the paper did not seem to have received it.

In response to the complaint itself the Editor-in-chief says that the protest was not considered sufficiently newsworthy to merit attention in the Herald two days after it was held. (The Herald is not published on Sundays) "Many events compete for coverage on our news pages every day; for Monday’s news columns - as for every day’s columns - we look for articles that are fresh or have some new angle. An interstate march that many of our readers would have seen on television news reports two nights previously, or heard about on radio news reports two days earlier, or seen mentioned in the previous day’s Sunday paper, is no longer news. If there is plenty of news copy on a Sunday night, then I’m afraid the less newsworthy items don’t make it into the paper."

The determination of what is in fact news obviously involves the exercise of editorial discretion. In a case such as this, the Council would not presume to attempt to substitute its judgement for that of the editor; the Council’s only requirement is that the exercise of editorial discretion be bona-fide and not tainted by an improper purpose. In the complete absence of any evidence of improper purpose the Council concludes that the determination not to publish any reference to the item concerned for the reasons given was in fact a legitimate exercise of editorial discretion. The complaint is therefore dismissed.

There is no denying that editorial discretion is indeed a power earned by an editor. News comes into newsrooms in all shapes and forms via press release, a diligent reporter or even impossible-to-ignore images. It is not always easy to prioritize a news bulletin with a day of important news stories or please everyone by having all their stories included in one edition. There is little more frustrating than having a conscientiously written story destined to lose currency if held off, left out of an edition because of editorial discretion. Yet hunger deaths still do not make the cut for the slowest of news days. The Herald was entitled to omit a story on a historic protest on the grounds that its newsworthiness had inevitably waned two days after the event took place. It was also fairly argued that the issue had been covered in competitor newspapers. But it remains constant that hunger deaths, while current every single day, are covered by no newspaper.

While the determination of what is news might be subjective, audiences are still required to endure the mundane obligatory entries like Groundhog Day. If we were to look at a nightly television news bulletin; as an audience member in order to be informed of the goings on of the last 24-hours, we are forced to sit through routine doses of weather updates, sports news, lottery results and awkward banter between the various presenters or news anchors. Whether we are finance-friendly or not we must also endure the latest on the Aussie dollar, the American dollar, the Euro and the Pound. All of this in between the nagging of unwelcome commercials. There is no justification worthy of why each day we are ignorant as to the number of people who have died from having no food to eat, but are constantly made aware of the status of the Dow Jones. Does everyone know what the Dow Jones is? No doubt the same people familiar with the All Ordinary.

It is vital for the press councils to enforce the reporting of hunger deaths as it is significantly in the public interest. There can be no editorial discretion on a story so severe. While every metropolitan newspaper, radio station and television network milked the images, newsworthiness and historic grandeur of 9/11 – not one medium came out and said it was not going to cover the story because it had already been sufficiently reported elsewhere. If any publication did in fact take on such a stance it would have risked running last in the circulation figures. Although the Herald’s editor-in-chief was entitled not to print a story on Krooglik’s gun rally, we must not be fooled that the story was omitted solely because it was old news or it had already received generous coverage as it was. The editor-in-chief could easily have not run the story because (a) he didn’t care to run it; and (b) he didn’t have to. Editorial discretion is as powerful a weapon as a gun itself.

The following is an example of an instance when the Australian media has not even omitted a significant news story on the grounds of it being old news. The complaint reads as follows:

Australian Press Council (November 1999)

Adjudication No. 1062

The Press Council has dismissed a complaint by Gary Dean against the Courier-Mail.

The complainant asserted that the paper had failed in its duty to the people of Queensland in giving insufficient prominence and content to a report relating to the sinking of a boat carrying illegal immigrants to Australia resulting in significant loss of life. He pointed to articles of greater substance on the issue in other papers.

The Courier-Mail stated that it had made an editorial decision that the issue had been sufficiently covered in other media reports and that the reporting of other news should be given priority. This was a judgment that the paper was entitled to make.

Again, editorial discretion allowed the Courier Mail not to run a fairly important news story where people had in fact died. Whether this story might have been included had the ‘significant loss of life’ been Australians, we will never know. In fairness to the newspaper, in the realms of private enterprise one should be able to print whatever the hell they like. However, the inevitably high level of responsibility the media has should outweigh any such carefreeness. In considering the defence that this story had been covered elsewhere, one has to come to terms with the fact that this argument comes from no guidelines whatsoever. So what then even makes a story worth printing? What makes a news story not within the public interest? What is the newsworthiness of an Australian death in Australia in comparison to an immigrant’s death in Australia? And what is the newsworthiness of an immigrant’s death in Australia in comparison to an illegal immigrant’s death in Australia?

Without screaming racism here, while there is nothing wrong with patriotism and producing a newspaper that deals with Australian events and Australians’ issues, it would seem a little mean-spirited to prioritize news reporting of, say, an Australian person’s death in Australia over a non-Australian. This example of editorial discretion does not feel in the spirit of ethical or responsible journalism at all. Nor does it come across as merely Australian. Or to appropriately relate this attitude to the Australian Journalists’ Association Code of Ethics, this does not fit into the doctrine of reporting and interpreting a news story ‘with scrupulous honesty by striving to disclose all essential facts and by not suppressing relevant available facts and not distorting by wrong or improper emphasis’. Again, by omitting an important news story from a particular edition, improper emphasis is given to a lesser-important news story included in that edition.

But then again, we are talking about Australia after all. We’ve never had much of a reputation for being overly welcoming to our asylum seekers. To some, Australia is thought of as the land where bruised and battered illegal immigrants with missing legs and teeth from dodging bullets are rounded up and sent back to where the poor bastards had just escaped. And to a point this is true. The material would be enough to inspire an episode of This Is Your Life where Reni the farmer from Darfur takes a trip down memory lane, while Sudanese rebel fighter and part-time torturer Mghani Mghani joins Mike Munroe in the Channel 9 studios to discuss the hilarious time he sawed off our guest’s right arm before Mr Mghani waves to the camera before sitting on the couch next to an old debt-collector Reni once fellated.

Australia has done well. We started off as criminals and worked hard to spawn fit-and-proper law-abiding citizens purely from the seeds of stealing, murdering scum. We took the principle of taking lemons and turning them into lemonade and built a country on people who made mistakes and gave them a fair go. In addition, with a whopping 20 million people in our country and only 3 million square miles of uninhabited land, it isn’t as if Australia is stuffed at the seams. When the media is taking a stance by not printing a story on the deaths of illegal immigrants reaching our shores – it is taking a political stance, even if its omission can only be interpreted that way. The omission of extreme poverty is interpreted too by readers as an unimportant story not making the cut in today’s edition.

In another ingenious collaborative effort between the US and Australia, past leaders George W Bush and John Howard made a refugee-swapping deal in April 2007. In an aim to deter people-smuggling in the two countries, all refugees arriving in America would be sent to Australia while all refugees destined for Oz would be sent to the United States. As a result, Cuban asylum seekers might find themselves in Australian detention centres while Pacific boatpeople would be calling Guantanamo Bay home. Since Barack Obama came into power however in 2009, one of the first things he did was close the Guantanamo Bay facility.

Meanwhile, a complaint brought forward to the New Zealand Press Council gives an insight into just how much editorial discretion some editors maintain. While the New Zealand Press Council pretended to tan the hide of the New Zealand Herald for failing to respond to a reader’s letter, and the New Zealand Herald threw its hands up in admission of their breach of fairness, the New Zealand Press Council still failed to uphold a complaint about the omission of reporting Iraqi casualties in a story about the new Iraq War. Perhaps if Jake the Muss sat on the panel things would be a little different. Nevertheless, the complaint reads as follows:

New Zealand Press Council (March 2004)

Case Number 968:

Philip Rama Vs New Zealand Herald

Philip Rama complained to the Press Council about an article in the New Zealand Herald on 14 November 2003 which reported on the death toll amongst coalition forces in Iraq. The article was accompanied by a graphic, sourced to Reuters and the New Zealand Herald, which enumerated combat / non combat deaths of United States, British and other coalition defense forces respectively.

Mr Rama complained that the newspaper failed to publish any equivalent graphic enumerating casualties among Iraqi forces and civilians and this, he complained, breached Principle 1 of the Statement of Principles. It was his view that the newspaper should have reported the statistics from each side of the Iraqi conflict in order to provide readers with a fair and complete picture of this military action.

He complained to the New Zealand Herald by letter dated 19 November 2003. This letter was not acknowledged in any way by the newspaper. He reiterated his complaint by letter dated 12 December 2003 requesting a response as well as information about how to proceed with a complaint to the New Zealand Press Council. Again, his letter was not acknowledged in any way by the newspaper. He then complained to the Press Council which sought a response from the editor of the New Zealand Herald.

The editor argued that the story was about the effect the rising toll of casualties was having in the countries which had contributed military personnel to the coalition forces. There had been calls for the withdrawal of the troops from at least some of these countries and, accordingly, the editor determined the statistics which had contributed to these calls were a necessary component of this story.

The editor did not contest Mr Rama’s general view that readers should be made aware of the death toll among Iraqi forces and civilians, but he did maintain that this information was not directly relevant to the article about which Mr Rama complains. It was not, therefore, included in the particular article complained about.

The issue is whether the article was inaccurate. The Press Council concludes that it was not and it does not uphold the complaint. The article was one which had a specific and narrow focus. It was an accurate article within that focus.

Nevertheless, the Press Council does express disquiet about the newspaper failing to acknowledge, or respond to, Mr Rama’s two letters of complaint. There has been no explanation from the editor about the reason for this omission. The Press Council re-iterates its previously expressed view that it is desirable for a newspaper to respond to complaints prior to any independent process of adjudication being embarked upon. In making these comments the Council does not overlook the difficulties faced by the editor of a large daily newspaper that receives a large volume of letters each day and on the face of some letters it is sometimes not clear that the letter is one of complaint not general comment.

When we were children, there was nothing worse than having our parents express disquiet towards us. Whatever we had done wrong, their disquiet continually made us rethink our behaviour, never wanting to do it again. Despite not knowing what ‘expressing disquiet’ actually means; we can learn from this case study as it is an example where news omission of casualties has taken place in a news story outside the focus of extreme poverty. Mr Rama’s argument is that the story on the Iraq war had only a reference to one set of casualties. This is an interesting set of circumstances as New Zealand is not a member of America’s Coalition of the Willing and its media is therefore immune from any nationalistic duty to illustrate a public interest on one particular side. Perhaps in Australia or the UK, this agenda of information might be (by the majority) acceptable due to these countries’ military commitment. Even still, it can also be argued that it has proven a considerably unpopular war. Ever since the premise of the war was justified by the invisible weapons of mass destruction and followed by the abuse going on at Abu Ghraib prison, audiences have continued to read about its unfolding controversial repercussions. Such repercussions have included the injection of more troops into Iraq and the abrupt demise of former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Therefore, the burning question is, exactly what is the media’s obligation in reporting casualties of somebody else’s war? Since we have already established casualties of hunger are not worth reporting at all – why did the New Zealand Press Council dismiss a case arguing Iraqi deaths were just as important as those of the coalition forces? Warranted, audiences could draw a connection between the number of coalition casualties and an increasing call to withdraw troops. But in spite of everything, why was the story itself about coalition forces and not both forces in the first place. Even if Saddam’s regime killed a million Kurds and a few of his own relatives doesn’t mean newspapers should be taking a political stance by only providing sympathetic information on his enemies. This type of news omission is more than mainstream, it is political, especially when the New Zealand government has played no role in either side.

If anything, New Zealand has expressed vast indifference towards the new Iraq war. In 2003, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark told the Sunday Star Times that the war in Iraq would never have eventuated if a hypothetical Al Gore was forced to handle the consequences of September 11. Aware that this was offloading a political stance and no doubt afraid she might wake up the following morning with a horse’s head on her pillow, Ms Clark later went on to retract her comments and apologize to the American government for any offence she might have triggered. Clark has even extended her political indifference to Africa, making public after the Australian government boycotted its cricket team’s tour of Zimbabwe in May 2007, that she respected her sportsmen’s freedom to travel. So how can the country’s press council act as lenient as it has towards its media’s omission of information in a news story as significant as a war? This is without even going into the matter that the council couldn’t even write the poor complainant a response to his letter.

If we travel back down under once again to that island paradise called Oz, we can look at a complaint adjudicated and dismissed by the Australian Press Council in 1999. The complaint argues that the Sun Herald portrayed the Serbian forces responsible for ethnic cleansing against the Kosovar Albanians, in a positive light. The complaint reads as follows:

Australian Press Council (June 1999)

Adjudication No. 1034

The Press Council has dismissed a complaint by Virginia Robison against The Sun-Herald, about an opinion column critical of the recent NATO campaign against Serbia, prompted by the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Kosovo.

The column ("Once were heroes") sought to contrast the Serbs "who valiantly fought against Hitler and remained undefeated in World War II" with the "leaders of Kosovo’s so-called liberation front [who] are bandits and mercenaries, armed and financed by deeply right-wing forces". It was a robust piece, punctuated by a number of provocative assertions.

Ms Robison complained that the article presented a distorted and inaccurate picture of the Kosovo conflict, and she took offence at its omission of any reference to the widely-reported atrocities committed against the Kosovar Albanians. She considered that, by publishing the article, The Sun-Herald was condoning genocide by the Serbs.

In a private letter to Ms Robison, the paper expressed regret that she had been offended by the column. However, it said that its author, as a columnist, was entitled to express his point of view, however controversial.

Ms Robison found this unsatisfactory, challenging the paper's right to support a writer whose column, in her view, breached Press Council principles of accuracy, fairness and avoidance of offence, among others.

The opinion column was written in the context of the broad coverage of the Kosovo conflict in The Sun-Herald and other media. It was but one opinion in that coverage. The Council's approach in similar matters has been to allow newspapers considerable latitude in what they publish as clearly-identified opinion pieces. By their very nature, such pieces often provoke disagreement amongst some readers, who are encouraged to write a letter to the editor putting their alternative point of view.

This is one of those instances where a journalist can be seen going through an identity crisis. In the same way at dinner parties Hitler might be argued as an undoubted great political motivator – people become unsatisfied by only having to offer opinions that can be formulated by anyone. There is no doubt that a history lesson on the Serbs at their most triumphant would make fascinating reading in a time of political unrest. All dichotomies prove interesting. Yet omitting the present murders would be as offensive to some as our dinner party guests praising Hitler for his great PR skills. Imagine how offended someone might feel in a far off place with nothing to eat, no clean water and nothing to shelter them but the skin on their bones, if every newspaper in the world had omitted their story and a billion others’ every single day. The truth is they will never be offended. People who do not read know little about newspapers and people with no education know nothing of press councils.

It is the scenario of the tree falling in the woods with no one there to hear it. Or however this bad analogy is supposed to be worded. These are voiceless people. On the opposite side of the world from Kosovo, the Albanians had an ally with Virginia Robison of Australia. While the representatives of the Sun Herald were the baddies at the Sydney-based press council in 1999, they were also, in a sense, the conscientious. Of course any publicity is good publicity and the more media coverage an important story such as ethnic cleansing receives, the more attention is given. There is more chance for public outcry, more chance for debate and more opportunity for sympathy and the positive repercussions of that sympathy.

One has to remember too that these were turbulent times. Today we look at the controversial war in Iraq and any layman can tell you there have been plenty of mistakes. However, NATO forces were the master of error in 1999. If Ms Robison had put off her grievances a couple more months, she would have been seen slamming the Herald for not making mention of the damage the Albanians’ very own knights in shining armour were wreaking. Accidentally bombing an Albanian refugee camp as well as the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the only justification NATO had for their blunders were being given obsolete maps by the CIA; the same CIA that would later provide intelligence guaranteeing weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq. You see what can happen when you don’t have Google Earth! Let’s just hope the Chinese didn’t hold a grudge this whole time and decide to put something in the swimming pools come the Olympic Games. Luckily for us, communist countries are renowned for their senses of humour and the whole thing has blown over by now.

Three Chinese journalists died at the embassy on May 7, 1999. And while the CIA and NATO admitted fault on their parts, two European newspapers from the UK and Denmark published collaborative reports on their theories on why the bombings occurred. The Observer and Politiken, respectively, stated that the Chinese embassy was being used as a relay station for the Yugoslavian military’s army radio transmission. Other theories later surfaced such as Slobodan Milosevic being at the embassy during the time of the attack. But it has been generally accepted that the bombing was indeed a mistake. As for casualties, NATO was able to keep the civilian body-count down to a modest 2,000. This is trivial compared to the hundreds of thousands of civilians having been killed in Iraq over the past four years.

As horrifying as these casualties are, the 35 million hunger deaths over four years remains even more startling. They are not victim to complicated wars or radical political affiliations. They are simply deaths from hunger and chronic malnutrition. The repetition of this fact throughout this book is intended to trigger a sense of absurdity but I am concerned it could be annoying readers into indifference. However, the situation is just so awful. And what makes it scary are our societies’ allowance for it to go on continuing. The following complaint is an example of exactly what it is our politicians have gone to the press councils about. In 1992, a time when 35,000 people died each day from hunger, 10,000 a day more than which die today, an Australian federal politician took this complaint to the Australian Press Council. The complaint reads as follows:

Australian Press Council (June 1992)

Adjudication No. 442

The Press Council has dismissed a complaint by Mr Wilson Tuckey against The West Australian over the paper’s failure to publish a story on a question he asked in Federal Parliament on 21 December 1989.

The question concerned the refund by Murdoch University of a higher education fee paid by the wife of the Minister for Education, Mr John Dawkins. Mr Tuckey said that the alleged refund was obtained by backdating an application by Mrs Maggie Dawkins, and questioned whether the Minister had exerted pressure on the university to obtain preferential treatment for his wife.

In his complaint to the Press Council, Mr Tuckey suggested that the failure of The West Australian to cover the story (though at least one other newspaper had done so) was one of a number of incidents demonstrating political bias in favour of the Labor Party.  

He said he had been told by the paper’s editor, that the reason for the omission had been lack of space.

The Press Council agrees that the matter of alleged preferential treatment for the wife of a West Australian Minister by a West Australian university could be seen as newsworthy and might well have merited a follow-up story. However, the next day Mr Dawkins issued a denial which has not been questioned.

The Council accepts the newspaper’s defence that decisions on new stories must be made on the day, and stories may be crowded out by lack of space and an over-embarrassment of major news.

The Council considers that The West Australian has not demonstrated political bias, as alleged by Mr Tuckey.

That’s right, two-and-a-half-years after the incident occurred, this complaint was brought to the press council by the then Shadow Minister, Wilson Tuckey. Fifteen years later the same Minister (in a government in power) would use a parliamentary letterhead to write a request to a district magistrate letting his son off of a traffic infringement. So either the devastating adjudication handed out by the press council in 1992 taught Mr Tuckey that it does not pay to use one’s political authority responsibly, or he has possessed these double standards all along. Unfortunately, this is the selfish mentality of our politicians in today’s world. It is not entirely mean-spirited but it is an attitude unintelligent and blind to relativity.

Even the most popular independent politicians, representing no parties and working hard for their local communities take on this selfishness when they refuse to remind their own local communities of what they should not be letting occur in other parts of the world. Hull and Cincinnati and Wagga Wagga and Cork and Aberdeen and all the thousands of different shires, municipalities and councils out there are not the only places in the world with problems. It is okay to be emotional over a region’s hardships that need to be dealt with but it is unacceptable to ignore the hardships much more severe elsewhere.

A solid commitment to humanitarian aid is a back-of-the-mind platform voters take for granted. We wait for visually provocative disasters to occur such as the Boxing Day Tsunami and watch our governments commit extensively to humanitarian aid, using this information for the next election when it is time to vote. However, we rarely see any specific policies for furthering overseas humanitarian aid. And we are still unaware that the ‘we’ll deal with the situation when the situation arises’ mentality is unacceptable. Natural disasters that make great television are not the only disasters going on in our world.

We are a sophisticated planet with laws forcing us to implement Slippery Surface signs on wet floors to avoid injuries and make available welfare for the poverty-stricken jobless with the potential to stain our tidy towns. Yet for 25,000 deaths a day in someone else’s territory we have to resort to an infrequent summit to spark our concern or a visit by Angelina Jolie or some other celebrity wishing to speak to our nation’s treasurer rather than promote his or her new movie. The occasional reminding that the third world is facing a humungous crisis everyday is contributing to its constant demise. Politicians all over the world are more concerned about their own small tragedies that they do not have time for the rest of the world’s much larger ones.

And as bureaucratic as our politicians continue to behave, so too, do our press councils. A complaint of omission made by a Fijian politician against the Fiji Times and dismissed by the Fiji Media Council in 2000, shows tremendous bureaucracy in a way that wastes council time and is not in the spirit of what the council is trying to achieve. The complaint reads as follows:

The Media Council (Fiji) Ltd (February 2000)

Complaint No. 98 – Assistant Minister for Information Vs The Fiji Times

Complaint:
On 29 December 1999, the Assistant Minister complained that the Fiji Times refused to publish his letter to the Editor dated 20 December in response to a letter published in the Fiji Times on 20 December from Rick Turner.

Response:
The Fiji Times claimed that the letter from the Assistant Minister was a tirade against the Fiji Times and as there was nothing new in the letter it was not published.

Facts:
The letter from Mr Turner was headed "Arrogant Minister" and contained some strong and perhaps defamatory statements about the Assistant Minister. The focus of the Assistant Minister's letter, which the Fiji Times declined to publish, was on the Fiji Times policy rather than the allegations Mr Turner had made against him.

Decision:
The Complaints Committee has in the past upheld the Editor's right to decide on what letters to publish in the newspaper. However, this right cannot be interpreted as absolute. The Editor remains subject to the provisions of accuracy, balance and fairness as well as the opportunity to reply that are provided for in the Council Code of Ethics and Practice.

Each complaint against a newspaper that letters are not being published will be dealt with on its individual merits. Each media organisation will have its own criteria for deciding on letters to the Editor, but generally, the Committee believes that matters such as length, appropriateness, legality, risk of defamation, public interest and entertainment should influence decisions. With regard to the case at issue, the Committee is of the opinion that the Editor might have used his discretion and not published the letter from Mr Turner, or he might have carried out some editing of it and deleted some of the more offensive parts.

Once the letter was published the Committee considered that the Assistant Minister had a right of reply as provided for in the Media Council Code.

However, as stated above, the Assistant Minister abrogated this right when, in his letter to the Editor, he attacked the Fiji Times rather than comment on the contents of letter from Mr Turner.

Accordingly, the complaint is dismissed.

Therefore, the way the complaint was initially worded influenced the decision of the council. While Turner was entitled to write angrily about the arrogant assistant minister, the arrogant assistant minister was not entitled to write angrily towards the Fiji Times for omitting his response. And in the meantime, the press councils tend to no complaints concerning the omission of news stories that deal with nine-million people dying each year from hunger-related deaths. Closely consulted by the Australian Press Council, the Fiji Media Council (not unlike the New Zealand Press Council) has a history of siding more often than not, with that of the newspaper publication. Whether this is a teething issue for such a newly founded media accountability system, it still seems inappropriate for such an important organisation. If press councils cannot adjudicate responsibly over trivial quibble between politicians, newspapers and their readers – then how can we expect them to address responsibly the need to concentrate on the significantly important issue of extreme poverty news omission?

Throughout the world, press councils are dealing with complaints concerning news omission all the time. And these are complaints only from audience members who are aware that press councils exist. I am sure many journalists do not even know what a press council is and of its function. However, once press councils start becoming known to the public, more media audiences can start issuing more complaints. The invisibility of the press councils contributes to extreme poverty deaths. The lack of knowledge on the severity of extreme poverty also contributes to extreme poverty deaths. However, once the functions of the press councils are on the tips of everyone’s tongues, we can then coordinate an attack on news omission of important information on a grand scale. Like the end of a movie where hundreds of thousands of letters mailed to a hard-done-by character concludes the story on a high. This assault however, should bring much more closure.

Again, it is vital to stop thinking of politicians as holding all the power to key issues. And extreme poverty has become more than a key issue these days. It has become a disgusting reality in what should only be seen in a futuristic sci-fi movie. And the less we see of this reality the less we care. People are a mixture of races who inherit the involuntary attributes of needing to see-to-believe. The world needs to start thinking more laterally and cunningly to help people needing our help. The media is the most powerful industry in the democratic world and one of the reasons for this is because it is so loosely governed. The people of the developed world need to make a complaint that is, at last, worth complaining about and the press councils need a complaint that they can make a difference, by judging.