PCC: Daily Record breached code on intrusion into grief

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The Press Complaints Commission has upheld a complaint against Scottish title the Daily Record which accused the newspaper of intruding into a family's grief.

According to an adjudication published today, the complaint was in relation to an article titled "Arthur's Seat body find", which included a photo of the deceased wrapped in sheeting.

The aunt of the deceased complained that use of the image was insensitive and caused distress to family and friends. "The complainant said that her nephew was not a celebrity and the newspaper should have exercised a level of restraint rather than publishing such an explicit photograph which had upset and shocked the many who knew him." The PCC said the newspaper did apologise for the distress and upset caused and that the image was removed from the online version of the article. However it did not accept a breach of the editors' code, arguing

that t

he body was covered and visible to the public and that publication "was a matter of editorial judgement".

This was not accepted by the complainant, and while the PCC

welcomed the newspaper's offer to apologise

, it upheld the complaint. "Newspapers are fully entitled to report on tragic events which take place in public, some of which - by their very nature - will cause distress and upset to family and friends," the adjudication stated. "This will often include the taking and publishing of photographs. The overriding requirement under Clause 5 of the Editors' Code is that publication must be 'handled sensitively' at times of grief or shock." The ruling adds: "In this case, it agreed that it was legitimate for the newspaper to report that a body had been found, and noted that it had occurred at a well-known location, in a public place. "However, in all the circumstances, it did not think that this was sufficient to justify the specific nature of the photograph. In the Commission's view, the outline of the body through the sheeting would have been visible to readers. "It quite understood why this had caused the complainant and her family such distress. The Commission considered that the use of this type of explicit image did not meet the Code's requirement of handling publication 'sensitively'.

"

PCC Director Stephen Abell added: "Tragic stories such as this raise difficult questions for editors, who need to strike the correct balance between publishing information about a death for their readers at the same time as handling publication with due sensitivity. "This was a difficult case, but the Commission ruled that the use of the image crossed a line. The adjudication is an important addition to the PCC's case law under Clause 5 of the Editors' Code, and editors should learn the lesson from it."