Press Council complaint upheld

The Press Council has found an article, ‘‘The Wonder Years’’, published in Sunday magazine and on Stuff on February 12, 2017, has breached the privacy of the writer’s grandmother. Two Council members dissented from this decision.

The article was highly personal in nature and covered the writer’s relationship with her grandparents and with her former partner. It included descriptions of her grandmother’s current physical and mental health and also included excerpts from love letters written by her grandfather to her grandmother.

Among other things, it described the grandmother as suffering from various physical and mental health conditions including Alzheimer’s disease.

The main complaint is that very intimate details of the complainant’s parents’ lives were published without consent. In particular, the complainant says that her mother [the grandmother] is ‘‘an exceptionally private person and would mind tremendously that her personal health information as well as my father’s love letters to her, have been publicised for all to see’’.

While the complainant’s mother’s health at the time of publication was such that she was unable to give or withhold consent to the publication, consent should have been, but was not, sought from all the immediate family, the complainant said.

Further, the love letters are her mother’s personal property and similarly should not have been published without her consent or that of all the immediate family.

The editor of the Sunday StarTimes, Jonathan Milne, responded to the complainant, saying that the article was a piece of courageous first-person journalism of a high standard. It had been prepared with the agreement and support of two of the grandmother’s daughters (the journalist’s mother and aunt) and with the subsequent support of her sister. One of the daughters held power of attorney for the grandmother and had provided the letters to the journalist.

In the view of the editor, the disagreement was a family matter and should remain in the family. He says ‘‘There is no breach of privacy. There is no failure of editorial oversight – if anything the opposite is true. This is [the journalist’s] story: it is hers to tell’’.

Mr Milne advised that the grandmother had agreed to be interviewed for an article some years previously when she was still of sound mind, and that while the article was several years in the making, it was the result of that interview.

The Press Council, in a decision released today, said there is no doubt that some of the material published in the article, and in particular the love letters, was personal and private, and should not have been published without the consent of its subject, the journalist’s grandmother.

The editor refers to an interview some years earlier and appears to submit that the article is based on that interview, where clearly valid consent was given. However, the material that the complainant is most concerned about consists of information about the grandmother’s recent and current state of health, both physical and mental, and the love letters. Neither of these can have been the subject of the earlier interview.

There is no evidence that there were any editorial enquiries into consent issues prior to publication. Given that the grandmother was named, that the article mentioned what could be highly sensitive health information, along with the intimate detail of the love letters, such enquiries should have been made. Consent could not be inferred from the fact that the article was written by a member of the subject’s family.

It should have been obvious to the editor that the grandmother was in a very fragile state of health and not capable of giving consent. Given that the article was written by a staff member, the granddaughter of the recipient of the sensitive material, the majority of the Council members are well satisfied that the editor should have taken steps to be sure that a valid consent existed to the publication of the most sensitive of correspondence … love letters from many, many years before. Critically, the story in the love letters belonged not to the family but to the grandmother and her alone.

Further the majority are satisfied that the grandmother’s right to privacy outweighs any public interest. The portion dealing with the letters carries little genuine public interest.

The Press Council has considered the relevance of the various limited powers of attorney held by members of the family and the possibility that holders of those powers of attorney could have given or withheld consent to publication. However, it is not the function of the Council to decide points of law, and in any event, it is reasonably clear that no consent of any kind was sought or given prior to publication. The Council expresses no opinion on the legal issues.

The Council stressed that this decision was based on the facts of this case alone and in no way sets any precedence.