The Press Council has ruled News Corp’s “intrusive” coverage into the life of Q&A question-asker Duncan Storrar last year was justified and in the public interest.
In May last year just after the 2016 budget, Storrar asked Financial Services Minister Kelly O’Dwyer a question on the ABC’s flagship panel show why the government was giving tax cuts to corporations and now low-income earners like himself so he could afford to take his daughters to the movies.
The man was lauded in some parts of the media as a hero, and a GoFundMe page was set up and raised over $60,000 for Storrar.
Enter the Herald Sun, which published a story headlined “ABC Hero a Villain: Q&A sob story star exposed as a thug as public donate $60,000” detailing Storrar’s criminal history and interviewing one of Storrar’s children.
The story led to over a week of negative coverage from News Corp papers about Storrar in the first week of the 2016 election campaign.
The Press Council received a number of complaints about the original article (but not from Storrar himself) and on Friday announced that it had concluded that the coverage was all above board.
Herald Sun argued that because Storrar chose to go on Q&A (or rather sit in the audience and ask a question) as well as being interviewed elsewhere in the media it was fair to report on Storrar’s history. It told the Press Council it actually didn’t report all the information it had on Storrar in its coverage.
The publication tried and failed to contact Storrar before publication, and argued the use of the terms “thug” and “villain” were justified given Storrar’s criminal history.
The council said that bringing up Storrar’s past might have had a chilling effect on freedom of speech for anyone wanting to just ask a question to a government minister, but because of Storrar’s past, as well as the subsequent media interviews and the GoFundMe campaign, it was reasonable reporting.
While the article did intrude on Storrar’s expectations of privacy, the Press Council said it was in the public interest to report on Storrar’s criminal past. — Josh Taylor
And the NewsCrap publication is owned by a thug called Rupert.
Wow, anybody in the Q&A audience posing a question will need a perfectly clean slate – along with their preceding generations of ancestors. Picture it now:
Unemployed Troublemaker on Q&A Shares DNA With Convicted Poacher
So anyone who publicly embarrasses one of Limited News’ “protected species” is fair game to have their lives rended through their one-sided media mangle?
While they can withhold information detrimental to the image of their pets – in the “public interest”?
Storrar should have got a Walkley for posing the best question of the 2016 campaign. He had Kelly O’Dwyer, the duty minister on Q&A that night, fumbling for an answer while eliciting nothing but a sermon from industry representative Innes Willox who said he wouldn’t pay much tax, so what use a tax cut. Gold Walkley for Storrar and comedy gold from O’Dwyer and Wolcox, two privileged insiders.
That’s why Storrar had to be discredited – by Murdoch’s Muppets.
I can see that you can’t make it illegal to report matters about an individual, especially when they are on the public record as criminal convictions are. Even so, this affair is a bit of a worry.
Mr Storrar was not a public figure nor was he a candidate for public office. He is an ordinary person who in his 15 minutes of fame publically discomfited a Federal Government minister on national TV. Newscorp, which often seems to act as the Liberal Party’s media wing in this part of the world, undertook to investigate him and, when they found skeletons in his closet, splashed details of them on the front page of one of Australia’s most widely read news outlets.
Is this what critics of this Government can expect, to be investigated and, if not found to be squeaky clean, publically exposed by Newscrap?