The Media Council has upheld three complaints which arose from a NZ Herald story about the number and cost of pedestrian crossings in an infrastructure project in the Auckland suburb of Point Chevalier. The story published online and in print on 13 February was headlined AT pushes on with project building $500k crossings.
Richard Easther, Linda Price and Heather MacBride complained the $500K figure in the headline and body of the story referred to crossings elsewhere, not Pt Chevalier. The figure was wrong and “egregiously misleading”. They said reporter Bernard Orsman had the correct, cheaper estimates of between $19-31K for the Pt Chevalier crossings which were supplied by Auckland Transport (AT) but he failed to include these in the story. The complainants also said the NZ Herald’s subsequent corrections in print and online were not sufficient or given fair prominence.
In response, the NZ Herald said the story’s focus was AT’s decision to stick with 28 of the 29 crossings originally planned for Pt Chevalier despite its review and not the cost of the crossings. The NZ Herald said it “deeply regrets” the omission of the correct estimates for the crossings.
A print correction – correcting the headline and mentioning the omission – ran the next day on page A5 where readers usually expect corrections to run. The online homepage headline which referenced the $500k cost per crossing was corrected early on the day of publication. Later that day the correct cost estimates were added to the online story and a correction was added to the foot of the online story. AT was consulted and were happy with the edits.
The Media Council says the use of the $500,000 figure and omission of the much lower estimates was poor journalism and a mistake of this magnitude deserves a more thorough online correction. Despite the swiftness of the online correction, it failed to capture the gravity of the errors in the story. It only addresses the missing estimates without giving any context or explanation of the true facts. The homepage headline had been wrong and this was not acknowledged.
