Background on this dispute here. The Guardian has published an article stating that the paper’s external ombudsman found that the paper’s reader’s editor was correct in his actions regarding the Chomsky dispute. Read the full report here. Some excerpts from the article:
The
Guardian readers’ editor, Ian Mayes, was right to publish an apology
and correction relating to a G2 interview with Professor Noam Chomsky,
according to an independent outside review.
The
Guardian’s external ombudsman, John Willis, looked into the handling of
the Chomsky controversy after complaints that the correction had been
unfounded. After talking to all sides, Mr Willis concluded that Mayes
had behaved independently and correctly in publishing the correction.
"This was a serious matter," Mr Willis said.
"Overall
the newspaper took both the complaint from Chomsky and later from
others extremely conscientiously. It is ironic that they are
entertaining a complaint about their process when so few newspapers
have any independent process at all."
The
Guardian’s ombudsman did suggest, however, that Mayes had gone too far
in deciding to remove the original Chomsky interview from the website.
Such a move was unnecessary, Mr Willis said.
The
external ombudsman was called in by the Scott Trust, which owns the
Guardian, to review the fairness of the way the Chomsky affair was
handled after a 4,500-word complaint was received. The complaint, from
the writers David Aaronovitch, Oliver Kamm and Francis Wheen, argued
Mayes’s correction had inflicted a "serious injustice" on the author of
the original article who had accurately conveyed Prof Chomsky’s views.
The
Chomsky interview was written by Emma Brockes and published in G2 last
October. It suggested that Chomsky had cast doubt on atrocities
committed at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war by placing the word
massacre in quotation marks. In his correction, Mayes said there was no
evidence to support this claim and gave an unreserved apology to Prof
Chomsky.
Mayes also acknowledged that the
headline accompanying the interview – which was not written by Brockes
- had compounded the injury to Prof Chomsky.
Aaronovitch
and his fellow complainants objected to the correction, arguing that
Prof Chomsky "most certainly does seem to believe that . . . Srebrenica
was not a massacre". He had in the past put that case, they said,
"directly and unambiguously".
In his
adjudication Mr Willis disagreed, finding that Prof Chomsky had said
nothing in the interview to justify the claim that he had put massacre
in quotation marks. "Nor in the long complaint from David Aaronovitch
and others is there a direct quote from Chomsky that supports an
opposite view."
The ombudsman added:
"Nothing I have seen indicates that the independence of Ian Mayes was
in any sense undermined. Indeed, a verdict so very clearly in favour of
Noam Chomsky against the Guardian was not a result that the newspaper
would have welcomed."
…
