By Amanda Meade

The Australian Press Council started getting complaints about the coverage of the fatal crash at a primary school in Greenacre the day after it happened. While it won’t reveal the number of complaints or the publications complained about, the council has confirmed it is investigating more than one complaint.

The crash at the south-western Sydney school, in which two eight-year-old boys were killed, is of intense interest to the media, and most have covered it respectfully. TV crews and reporters rushed to the scene at Banksia Road primary school on Tuesday and got footage of anxious parents hurrying in and shots of a black four-wheel-drive sticking out of a demountable classroom. But what has made many people uneasy has been the interviews reporters conducted with children outside the school, and some of the images used.

he Daily Telegraph posted a video featuring an interview with an eight-year-old boy in which he vividly described the scene. Several unseen reporters threw emotive questions at him. It was the same on the commercial TV news, with both Seven and Nine running different “vox pops” with children, some of whom spoke about their friends being “asleep” or bloodied. The reporters’ questions asked them to relive the trauma, which is a traumatising experience in itself.

Jihad Dib, the MP for Lakemba in the NSW Legislative Assembly, attended the funeral of one of the boys on Thursday and has spent much of the week with the families. He told the Weekly Beast he understood the news value in the story but the media must remember children were “really, really fragile”. “Where do you draw the imaginary line?” Dib asked. “This is a little eight-year-old kid that we’re putting a camera in front of. The parents may have given permission but is it really appropriate to interview a child who says they saw another kid with blood on their face? Everyone responds differently to trauma; children may be really talkative or withdrawn. When there is something as tragic as this what are the unofficial rules?”

On the Daily Telegraph’s Facebook page some readers expressed outrage. “How disgraceful to interview a child who believes his friends are OK! You have no heart! I believe this story should be taken down … how would you feel if your child had just gone through this and was about to experience terrible grief was being asked questions by a bunch of vultures.” A headline in the Tele the next day left many readers cold: “Two school students dead at Greenacre: Dying boy yelled ‘I want my mum’.”

Another contentious issue was the prominent display of photographs of the young victims of the crash, including a close-up front-page photograph in the Tele of a distressed child emerging from the scene with bloody fingers in her mouth. The press council’s general principles say the media should “avoid intruding on a person’s reasonable expectations of privacy, unless doing so is sufficiently in the public interest” and to “avoid causing or contributing materially to distress … unless doing so is sufficiently in the public interest”. The journalists’ code of ethics says they should always respect private grief and personal privacy and never exploit a person’s vulnerability or ignorance of media practice.

Many readers on Facebook thought the coverage went too far. “The media ought to be ashamed of themselves reporting this little darling cried for his mummy,” one said. “As if the grieving parents don’t have enough heartbreak of losing their child they now have to live with those were his last words through the public.”

But on Thursday the Tele had a story shaming its competitor Daily Mail Australia for what it said were its unethical practices covering the tragedy. “The Daily Mail has outraged grieving relatives of the boys killed in the Greenacre tragedy by publishing their photos and names without permission,” the story said. “Distraught family members of both boys told the Telegraph they had not given permission to publish the photos. Under the Children (Criminal Proceedings) Act 1987 news organisations are prohibited from publishing identifying photos of children who have been victims of crime.”

The act does allow the identification of child victims with the consent of their next of kin. The Daily Mail declined to comment on why it had identified the boys, but the photographs were eventually blurred and the names were later removed.

A News Corp spokesperson said: “The Telegraph was critical of the Daily Mail because they published the identity – names and [an] unblurred picture – of the two boys, against the explicit directions of the family. The family asked The Daily Telegraph not to publish the photos of the boys yesterday, and they were sensitive to that request and didn’t. The interviews with young children you referred to were conducted in the presence of adults. The Daily Telegraph is proud of its sensitive coverage of this terrible tragedy and it’s demonstrated respect for the family’s wishes.”

On Friday morning both the Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald published the name and photograph of the boy whose funeral was held on Thursday after receiving permission from the family.

More ‘commercial realities’ at Fairfax

Fairfax has closed six more local newspapers citing “the commercial realities of operating these titles and need to embrace a new and more commercially sustainable approach to delivering our journalism”. The papers that will close are the north-western Sydney titles of Parramatta-Holroyd Sun, Blacktown Sun, St Marys-Mt Druitt Star, Penrith City Gazette, Hills News and Rouse Hill Courier. Eleven jobs will go as a result in Fairfax’s Australian Community Media division, which includes regional, rural and suburban newspapers. ACM has been significantly downsized in the past few years after the company indicated it would strip regional newspapers of subeditors and photographers under a plan to make reporters take their own pictures and sub their own copy.

Walkley winner Philip Chubb dies
Philip Chubb, a journalist who had an impressively varied career, winning a Gold Walkley, a Logie and a Gold UN media peace prize before joining academia in 2008, has died of cancer. Chubb worked for the Age, Time Australia and was the national editor of ABC television’s 7.30 Report. Along with the ABC producer Sue Spencer Chubb took home the Gold Walkley for the brilliant 1993 Labor in Power series for ABC TV.

Courier’s new men were Newman fans

It’s not often you get the frank, unfiltered view of the state’s highest judge on the media. But that is exactly what the former president of the Queensland court of appeal, Margaret McMurdo AC, gave when she delivered her Griffith University Tony Fitzgerald lecture this week. McMurdo, who retired this year, made headlines when she told the then chief justice, Tim Carmody, she could never sit with him again on any court.Carmody had been appointed by the former premier Campbell Newman.

“Immediately following Newman’s election, David Fagan was editor-in-chief of both the Courier-Mail and the Sunday Mail and Michael Crutcher was editor of the Courier-Mail,” McMurdo said in her speech about the Fitzgerald inquiry and happenings in governance over the 30 years since. “In the absence of both an upper house of review and an effective opposition, these newspapers, under the editorial direction of Fagan and Crutcher, took on the role of government watchdog. They were especially critical of the government’s sacking of 14,000 public servants. There was the usual, healthy tension with the courts over the reporting of cases but, at this time, these papers generally respected and accepted judicial independence.”

But McMurdo said that on the direction of Rupert Murdoch, Fagan was removed as editor-in-chief and not replaced and Chris Dore (who is now the editor of the Daily Telegraph) took Crutcher’s job as Courier-Mail editor. Peter Gleeson, editor of the Gold Coast Bulletin, became editor of the Sunday Mail. “The papers’ editorial direction did an about turn,” she said. “They became enthusiastic supporters rather than critics of the government, for example, they seemed surprisingly positive about the controversial appointment of Chief Justice Carmody. There was concern that elements of the media were actively supporting the Newman government’s attack on the independence of the supreme court.”

Bit of a stretch
A press release titled “Celebs get behind ‘Brolates’ – pilates for blokes” had half of Sydney’s media groaning this week, and is a strong contender for worst PR idea of the year. The press were invited to attend the Vive Active pilates studio on the northern beaches on Wednesday night to see “Commando Steve Willis, TV personality Tom Williams, Bachelorette audience favourite, James Trethewie and Ironmen Kendrick Louis and Ky Hurst” take part in a beefy blokes Pilates class because “a lot of blokes might think Pilates is ‘just for girls’.”