Press watchdog Ipso has upheld a complaint about a column by Liz Jones posted on Mail Online – but rejected criticism of the same article when it was published in the Mail on Sunday.
Faith Clark complained to Ipso on behalf of Hearing Dogs for Deaf People that the Mail on Sunday had been inaccurate in an article headlined “The disabled make good staff - unlike baldies with beer bellies”, published on 19 October 2014.
In the comment piece about the value of disabled people in the workplace, columnist Liz Jones she said she had four “hearing dogs”.
Clark complained that the coverage gave the inaccurate impression that the columnist has four specially trained assistance dogs. The charity had previously contacted the Mail on Sunday and Jones to request that she refrain from describing her dogs as “hearing dogs”.
She also complained about a picture on Mail Online captioned “Home help: ‘I have four hearing dogs that are trained to create a commotion if my fire alarm goes off’”.
Clark said the site had not removed the picture or provided any clarifying statement for “several days” after the story had been published. She also said that a number of readers’ comments had been deleted from the article.
Ipso initially considered the complaints against the Mail on Sunday and Mail Online together, but was told by the paper that Mail Online was subject to independent editorial control and should be considered separately.
The publisher explained that the columnist’s dogs had been trained by a canine behaviour expert to alert her to certain sounds.
It added that that the Equality Act does not define any particular qualifications for “hearing dogs”, and the term could can be used as a generic description of a dog that helps people with hearing difficulties, comparable to “sheepdog, guard dog or gun dog”.
The publisher said that any reader who was interested in the provision of assistance dogs would have known that the charity would not have provided anyone with four of their highly trained dogs. The article did not state that the dogs had been provided by a charity.
Mail Online added that the photograph of the dog it used had clearly been a generic image. After it had received the complaint, it amended the caption and added a footnote, and later removed the photograph from the online article altogether.
Ipso said the Mail Online article had been illustrated with a photograph of a dog wearing a vest which featured the charity’s logo, including its full name. It ruled that this gave the “significantly misleading impression that the dogs had been provided by the charity”.
It said that the removal of the photograph from the Mail Online article and publication of the footnote was sufficient remedial action.
However, Ipso cleared the Mail on Sunday’s version of the article, saying it “had made no reference to the charity or indeed suggested any involvement by any charity”.
