The Media Council has ruled that an RNZ headline 'Operation Burnham: Child killed, but death was justified, inquiry finds' and the first sentence 'A civilian child was killed during Operation Burnham in 2010, but an inquiry has found their death was justified under international law' were inaccurate.
090514. Photo Diego Opatowski / RNZ. Radio New Zealand House. Photo: RNZ / Diego Opatowski
The Media Council has also ruled that RNZ's action in correcting the statements was inadequate.
The article, published on 31 July, reported on the report of the Commission of Inquiry into Operation Burnham. This inquiry had actually found that the military operation, in which the child was killed, was legally justified. The Commission did not make any findings about the actual circumstances of the child's death.
Kevin Hackwell advised RNZ of the error by phone on 31 July and subsequent news bulletins were corrected. However several days later he noticed that the online version of the story still carried the incorrect version. He advised RNZ of this on 6 August. On 10 August the opening sentence was corrected, but the incorrect headline remained. When it remained uncorrected on 17 August Mr Hackwell lodged a formal complaint. This was acknowledged by RNZ on 19 August, but a week later the headline had still not been corrected.
RNZ acknowledged that it could have handled the matter better but they were under pressure from dealing with coverage of the pandemic. They maintained the difference between whether the operation in which the child was killed was legally justified and whether the child's death was justified is a fine distinction.
The Media Council noted the difference between the two propositions is significant and not a fine point. The implication of the headline stating that the child's killing was justified could be that the child was in some way involved in an action that warranted a military response. The implication is that the specific act of killing the particular child was justified. That is clearly not the finding of the Commission. The actual finding of the Commission was that a child had died in the operation in circumstances that could not be precisely established, but the operation itself was properly authorised and it could not be known that civilians were in proximity of the target.
The RNZ article had been content-shared with The New Zealand Herald and Newsroom. Mr Hackwell also complained about the lack of correction by both those publications. Both publications advised the Media Council that in such a situation they rely on the supplier of the story to email content partners with any required corrections. The Herald noted that RNZ is usually very quick in doing so, but they had opted to deactivate the story in the meantime.
RNZ advised content partners of the necessary corrective action on 28 August.
The Media Council did not uphold the complaint against Newsroom. There was no glaring error in the headline and first sentence. Newsroom had received the article from a respected source, RNZ, and was entitled in the absence of any obvious mistake in the article, to wait until it heard from RNZ. It published the full retraction immediately after it was received from RNZ.
The Media Council did not uphold the complaint against The New Zealand Herald, noting that they had taken the story down in the meantime to limit any damage.
This is a brief version of the Media Council ruling. The full decision can be found on the Media Council website.