THE BRITISH Press Complaints Commission said yesterday it had received a record 21,000 complaints about an opinion column in the Daily Mail last Friday which questioned the circumstances of Stephen Gately’s death.
The complaints followed widespread discussion of the article on social networking sites such as Twitter, the commission said, and represented by far the highest number of complaints it had ever received about a single article.
The column by Jan Moir, which was not carried in the newspaper’s Irish edition last week, was headlined “A strange, lonely and troubling death”. The column said the Boyzone singer’s death in Majorca after a night out “strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships”.
She added: “And I think if we are going to be honest, we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy. Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this.”
Moir issued a statement last weekend where she said it was “mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones”.
The commission says it will examine the complaints and determine if its code of practise has been violated. “Any complaint from the affected parties will naturally be given precedence by the commission, in line with its normal procedures.
“If, for whatever reason, those individuals do not wish to make a complaint, the PCC will in any case write to the Daily Mail for its response to the more general complaints from the public before considering whether there are any issues under the code to pursue.”
If a newspaper or magazine is found to have acted in breach of the code of practice, the editor is obliged to publish the commission’s criticisms in full and with due prominence.
Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is chairman of the commissions “code of practise committee”, which oversees the code by which all journalists and newspapers are expected to abide.
Yesterday, the newspaper carried an opinion piece by Janet Street-Porter, who said she was “astonished” to read Moir’s column. Street-Porter, who knew Mr Gately, said he was “almost too innocent for his own good” and that he died from “natural causes, not from guilt”.
