Former Sun managing editor Bill Newman is to leave his role as a board member of the press watchdog, it has been announced. Newman has claimed it was his association with the tabloid newspaper that precipitated the change.
Newman, who was a founder member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) board when it was put together in May last year, said he was told by its chairman, Sir Alan Moses, that an application to extend his tenure would not be welcomed.
He said he was called into Moses’s office after the June meeting of the board. Newman claimed: “He said we don’t want you to be on the board, we have decided we don’t want you to apply for a renewal of your contract.
“And he said it’s because of your connection to the Sun. I said that makes no sense at all because you knew I worked at the Sun when you appointed me. I think they have given in to political pressure,” Newman told Press Gazette.
Ipso confirmed that Newman was to leave at the expiry of his one-year contract in September. A spokesman said: “When that term ends, Ipso will – in accordance with our articles of association – advertise for a board member who has had ‘recent senior experience at a publisher operating in the national mass market newspapers sector’.”
Newman’s appointment to the 12-strong board was opposed by the families of the 96 people who died in the Hillsborough disaster because of his association with the Sun’s coverage of it.
In 1989, Newman wrote a letter to the families defending the stories it published – including the allegations that “some fans” urinated on and robbed the dead – as true. They were subsequently found to be based on false accounts given to the paper by the police.
He wrote: “We are sorry that, possibly clouded by grief, many have not understood that it is the Sun’s duty as a newspaper to publish information, however hurtful and unpalatable it may be at the time.
“On reflection, we accept the way in which the article was displayed could have given cause for offence. For that we apologise. For the substance we do not.”
At the time of his appointment, which coincided with the inquests into the disaster, the chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, Margaret Aspinall, said: “This feels like a fresh insult. It tells us that lessons have certainly not been learned by the press, despite their claims to the contrary.
“Mr Newman had a key role in defending the outrageous coverage of the Sun of the Hillsborough disaster and in the abject failure of the newspaper to properly apologise when it was clear they had printed hurtful lies and not ‘the truth’. That is why his appointment to the board of the new regulator is totally unacceptable to us and we believe will undermine public confidence in it.”
