Stig Abell, once director of the old Press Complaints Commission, is now managing editor of the Sun: and there’s a certain amount of frabjous joy to be had as he handles a complaint to the new Ipso regulators (from Trans Media Watch) about a Rod Liddle column wondering whether Emily Brothers would become Britain’s first blind, transgendered MP. “The thing is, though: being blind, how did she know she was the wrong sex?” Liddle wrote.
He grovelled for that in a subsequent column, but not hard and not seriously enough. Trans Media Watch, able to complain as a group under revised Ipso rules, kept up the pressure – which last week produced a full-frontal apologia from the Bun. Yet, so far as Abell is concerned, the matter doesn’t rest. He didn’t just reject Liddle’s “clumsy attempt at humour”. He reviewed the paper’s editorial processes and “instituted a new policy that all copy relating to transgender matters would be approved by the managing editor before publication”. The issues raised, moreover, “have been incorporated into staff training sessions”. With Rod, presumably, plonked on the naughty step, learning at long last the difference between a good joke and a lousy one.
■ The BBC spends £571,218 a year buying 600,190 copies of national newspapers – including 80,679 copies of the Guardian and 78,463 copies of the Daily Mail. Cue predictable Mail outrage. But the interesting thing here – excavated by a well-targeted freedom of information request – isn’t really the number of copies, nor the cost. It’s why transition online still seems so far away. A corporation that would like to be on the cutting edge of progress: and tonnes of dead forest still dropping on the mat. Inertia? Or tacit confirmation that journalists like to have the news curated for them by other journalists?
Trans Media Watch responds
Peter Preston praises the former director of the failed Press Complaints Commission (PCC), now managing editor of the Sun, for the way he handled our complaint about a column which pictured a blind transgender woman and asked “being blind, how did she know she was the wrong sex?”
Mr Preston’s facts are wrong, He claims Trans Media Watch is now “able to complain as a group under revised IPSO rules”. In fact, TMW was able to complain as a group to the PCC. The Independent Press Complaints Organisation, which is nearly a like-for-like replacement of the PCC, has indeed revised the rules, but only to make the process more difficult for complainants. Now, in order to complain, we need the explicit consent of the person who is claiming discrimination (only an individual is “protected” by the PCC/IPSO Code) and have to pass the extra hurdles of “significant breach” and “substantial public interest”.
Rod Liddle’s apology was inadequate not because it was “not serious enough,” as Mr Preston spins it, but because it took the opportunity to attack the complainant a second time, which amounts to victimisation in anyone’s book. The problem with the original column was not the difference “between a good joke and a lousy joke” as Mr Preston argues. It was found by IPSO to be prejudicial and pejorative about trans people and blind people.
Far from going further than the ruling, Mr Abell always denied that the article was a breach of the Code, refused to publish Mr Liddle’s original expression of regret (telling us to be satisfied that it had been covered by the Guardian), and failed to comply with the IPSO requirement that the ruling be published with a proper headline rather than being buried on the page. We are glad that Mr Abell intends to have future material about trans people checked by a managing editor, but note that competent editing is something the public should always be able to expect from a major newspaper, and does not merit special praise. We note that MrPreston has long expressed opposition to the effective and independent press regulation recommended by Leveson. In this case, the facts simply do not fit his argument. We do not seek to stifle the press, but ask only that they adhere to the rules they have freely chosen to sign up to. We sincerely hope that the Sun moves forward with the staff training on transgender issues that it made reference to during this case, and that we will have no reason to complain about its content in future.
Jennie Kermode
TMW Chair
BM TMW
LondonWC1
