Back in July this year, Sydney major newspaper/house of ceaseless bad takes, The Daily Telegraph, published an infographic alongside an article on a new health report that implied same-sex attraction amongst kids was a concern akin to heavy drinking, drug abuse or obesity.
Rightful outrage from LGBTIQ groups, media and more was responded to by the Tele with a painfully bad non-apology, which we at the time said “mostly put the blame on us, the news-reading public, for our poor interpretation skills, noting how the graphic ‘has been misinterpreted’.”
This morning the Australian Press Council released its findings after investigating a complaint regarding the article and graphic from the The Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Association of Australasia, which claimed:
The headline “FAT CHANCE OF BEING HEALTHY” and sub-headline “Young Aussies have only themselves to blame”, followed by the statistic about same-sex attraction in the centre among statistics relating to matters such as obesity and drug use, suggested same-sex attraction is unhealthy and warrants blame.
The findings are unsurprisingly that the Tele fucked up big time and breached a number of the Council’s Standards of Practice, including General Principle 1, that states publications must take reasonable steps to ensure that factual material in news reports and elsewhere is accurate and not misleading, and “is distinguishable from other material such as opinion“.
The Council also took aim at the publication’s official response to the backlash, noting how it was only published online and not in print and “did not acknowledge or apologise for the misleading nature of the graphic. Rather, it attributed the impression to readers having misconstrued the article” thus breaching General Principle 2 which regards remedial actions.
The official adjudication concludes that “the article caused substantial offence, distress, prejudice and risk to public health and safety, and there was no public interest justifying this“.
Hmmm, so exactly like everyone was saying at the time? Interesting…
Keep up the heinously shit-house and damaging work, Daily Tele!
