Our press councils in sad decline

By Don Sellar, J-Source |

So you think you have a legitimate beef against a newspaper. A reporter at The Daily Bugle who did you wrong in a feature story 10 days ago didn’t return your calls. Several days later, the editor in charge of corrections dismissed your complaint outright, and advised you to stop wasting his time.

Finally, the letters editor refused to run a short letter letting you have your say. She said the issue was already stale, two other letters on the issue had been published. Besides, she never runs letters as “back-door corrections.”

Your lawyer says what was written about you may well have been unfair, inaccurate and unflattering — maybe even libelous — but hardly worth a long, costly battle in the courts, with no guarantee of success.