Woman editor 'buried' PCC ruling

6 May 2009

The Press Complaints Commission has penalised Woman magazine for "burying" a critical adjudication.

The magazine will now have to publish the PCC's further criticisms in full for not featuring an earlier ruling prominently enough.

The original complaint stemmed from an article about the actress Natalie Cassidy which cited a confidential source to claim she had deceitfully visited a gym while preparing for the filming of her weight-loss DVD.

Her solicitors denied this and said she had lost weight exclusively by doing the exercises in her DVD. The complaint was upheld in December last year after Woman failed to provide on-the-record corroboration of the story.

Now the PCC has further rebuked Woman after finding that the report of the ruling was not given sufficient prominence in the magazine.

While the original article was a double-page spread on 8 and 9, the ruling appeared on page 30 and only around half of the text was used.

Woman argued that most of the omitted text referred to a description of the magazine's own defence of the original article.

But the PCC said: "All of this was unacceptable. The commission took a dim view of this conduct, which regrettably showed that the editor was not aware of her obligations under the Code of Practice".

The PCC has ordered editor Jackie Hatton to publish the second adjudication statement in full "with due prominence".

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