Transparency campaigner Julian Assange has lost a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission over a book review in the New Statesman.
In a piece headlined “Every Stone Unturned”, a review of the “unauthorised autobiography” of Assange published by Canongate, James Ball wrote:
[Andrew] O’Hagan’s writing is at its best covering Assange’s early life: a nomadic existence in rural Australia, replete with floppy disks hidden in beehives and nightly forays through secure servers. Yet even here, the strident note familiar from Assange’s public pronouncements often vanishes, replaced with the mannerisms of a British aesthete. “It occurred to me on the steps of the court that I had travelled a very long way to see such snow,” he muses after being granted bail on sexual assault charges in December. The language and tone are wholly uncharacteristic.
Assange believed that the reference here to “charges” was in breach of the PCC code. “I have not been charged with any offence and this statement therefore represents a significant and misleading inaccuracy. The facts are not hard to establish — a matter of basic fact-checking — and a correction should be printed with due prominence.” He added that the article contributed to a “hostile media climate” and “a reduction in my ability to raise revenue for Wikileaks through loss of reputation”.
The PCC disagreed, ruling:
It was not in dispute that the complainant had not been formally charged by Swedish authorities. As such, a claim that Swedish prosecutors had formally indicted the complainant with offences would clearly raise a breach of Clause 1 (i) of the Editors’ Code. However, the articles under complaint had not made such a claim: rather they had alluded to “charges” more generally. In the view of the Commission, this conveyed to readers, accurately, that the complainant was being accused by Swedish prosecuting authorities of having committed the offences (and that prosecutors were seeking his extradition with a view to his potentially being tried for those offences).
The PCC wrote to the editor of the NS, Jason Cowley, to inform him that the complaint “raised no breach of the Code of Practice and did not require further investigation. That is why we have not contacted you.”
In the interests of transparency and freedom of information, the New Statesman has uploaded the PCC judgement (here) and covering letter (here).
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