News

ACMA finds Nine News breached impartiality rules in report on council

Nine News Sunday’s reporting on allegations that former Ku-ring-gai Mayor, Councillor Cheryl Szatow, and the Ku-ring-gai Council had engaged in wasteful spending was ruled to employ a tone more commonly found in current affairs reporting, the media watchdog has found.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found the report, which went to air in Sydney on July 16 2016, breached the fairness and impartiality requirements of the news provisions of the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice.

Acting ACMA Chairman Richard Bean said in a statement: “The ACMA found that Channel Nine breached the fairness and impartiality requirements of the news provisions of the code by using non-neutral language, unfair juxtapositions of facts, comical graphics and a tone more commonly found in current affairs programming, to which different standards apply.

“The code requires that commercial television news programs present factual material accurately, and do so in a fair and impartial way.”

The ACMA also found the news item contained one factual assertion – the claim that the Mayor had spent $900 a week on flower deliveries to her office – was inaccurate. Nine has since advised the ACMA the figure referred to the total cost of 30 separate deliveries that occurred over a nine-month period.

Four other allegations of inaccuracy were investigated, however, no further code breaches were found.

In response to the ruling, Nine will inform relevant staff involved in the production and broadcast of the item of the ruling and use the matter as an example in future training of all relevant staff.

Nine declined to comment.

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