The Press Complaints Commission has resolved three complaints against national newspapers, all concerning clause one of the Editors’ Code of Conduct, accuracy.
Hamid Babaei, first secretary of the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, complained to the PCC after The Sun said one of the main suspects in July’s failed car bomb attack on Glasgow Airport, Dr Mohammad Asha, was from Iran. Asha, 27, who has been charged with organising the attack, is from Jordan.
The paper’s managing editor Graham Dudman accepted this was wrong and explained to the PCC that its reporters’ initial information was incorrect.
Subsequent articles in the paper were correct and articles were corrected on the paper’s website.
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Budget airline Ryanair complained over an article in The Sunday Times that compared the prices of traditional and ‘no-frills’airlines.
The article, headlined ‘The heavyweight price fight’on 17 June, the paper said that the cheapest price for a weekend break with Ryanair was £194 and described this as ‘the cheapest deal on the day in question”.
However, in an apology the paper said: ‘Ryanair had a cheaper return fare of £155, which was excluded because the return flight left Dublin at 8am on Sunday morning which we did not consider would provide a normal weekend break.
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‘This was the ‘cheapest deal on the day in question’. We are happy to clarify our position.”
A complaint against the Daily Mail’s coverage of the conflict between rival Palestinian groups was resolved after the paper printed a letter from a British-based campaign group.
Sharif Nashashibi, the chairman of Arab Media Watch, complained that the Mail inaccurately said that the ‘democratically Fatah government’was ‘wrecked’by the radical Islamic group Hamas.
In a letter he wrote: ‘Though the democratically elected Palestinian President is a Fatah member, the government in question contained no one from Fatah. It was formed by a Hamas Prime Minister and approved by the elected Parliament consisting predominately of Hamas MPs.
‘Fatah lost the last parliamentary elections and joined a national unity government only through negotiations with Hamas.”
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