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A satirical news web site has become the focus of an unusual row amid the polarised politics of Northern Ireland and its media.

The Portadown News, a bi-monthly ezine which makes fun of both sides in the conflict, was dropped by Freeserve after a complaint about comments posted to its message board.

Portadown is at the centre of much of the province's sectarian violence, and for this reason the site's editor preferred to remain anonymous. But he was outed - as Newton Emerson, a technical writer for US-owned local computer firm CCC Technologies - by a rival editor after a series of unseemly jokes appeared on the bulletin board.

Robin Livingstone, editor of the conventional weekly newspaper the Andersonstown News, made the complaint after his family was mentioned during a series of exchanges centred on his own satirical column. He also retaliated by outing Mr Emerson, who parted company with CCC Technologies soon afterwards.

The huge chat boards run by the Portadown News are at the centre of the problem. Mr Emerson thinks there may have been as many as 210,000 visits and exchanges on the boards that week.

An editor's only option in such situations is to either delete problematic postings in advance - impossible with so many visitors - or to provide a suitable reply via the board.

However, current English law sees the web host - Freeserve, in this case - as the publisher, and thereby liable under any laws that the pages may break.

They can escape legal liability providing they satisfy two criteria. They must prove they took reasonable care to ensure such material was not published, and once alerted to a problem, took steps to resolve it.

Ignoring the complaint will merely compound the offence if the site is later found to break the law. Thus a single complaint, as in the case of the Portadown News, results in the immediate deletion of the site in question.

According to Mr Emerson: "The story goes back to the Conservative governments of the 1980s, which suffered a series of censorship disasters: Spycatcher, Death on the Rock, endless run-ins with the BBC, the Sinn Féin voice-over farce.

"They set up quangos to monitor the media... it's too bad, really, that they're absolute bullshit. For example, The Broadcasting Standards Commission charges itself with investigating two types of complaint: standards, and fairness. The Independent Television Commission ensures impartiality, iIntegrity and objectivity. All refer to 'offensive material'. What does any of this actually mean?

"These privatised censors point out that they investigate only on the basis of public complaints, and that they don't perform acts of censorship. 'We don't vet or preview,' boasts the ITC. 'We can only consider programmes once they've been broadcast.'

"But this is precisely what makes privatised censorship so insidious. An after-the-fact regime leads to self-censorship, where the broadcaster or journalist is trying to second-guess not the Government but the entire British public. There are 57 million people in the UK: anything worth saying will offend large numbers of them. Most of us accept that we won't agree with everything we see or read, but not all of us do, and it doesn't take much 'offence' to cause trouble."

Mr Emerson also points out that in the year 2000 the Press Complaints Commission adjudicated 57 complaints. This means a rate of just one complaint per million people per year.

www.indexonline.org/news/20020127_northernireland.shtml

www.indexonline.org/news/20020128_northernireland.shtml

www.portadownnews.com/

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