Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1040-1059)
Tuesday 4 March 2003
Mr Stephen Hynard and Ms Julia Hynard
Q1040 Derek Wyatt: Can I just ask
you how old your nephew was?
Ms Hynard: 16.
Q1041 Derek Wyatt: Because the age
limit is 16, is it not?
Ms Hynard: Sorry?
Q1042 Derek Wyatt: The actual age
limit is 16 for reporting on juveniles.
Ms Hynard: Really, I did not know
that. I did not realise that.
Q1043 Derek Wyatt: Yes. * * * We
heard from The Mail on Sunday, or is it The Mail(s
editor—the boss—Paul Dacre, last week. In fact,
his evidence to us, which we can give you, I will read exactly
what he said: "all journalists employed by me have obedience
to the Code written into their contract as a requirement and face
disciplinary action, including dismissal, for deliberate breaches
of the code." So it comes with huge interest that you have
not found that to be the case, and it is mainly The Mail
and The Mail on Sunday?
Ms Hynard: Yes.
Chairman: It is interesting that most
of our witnesses at this moment had complaints about that group.
Q1044 Derek Wyatt: The Chairman said
of the previous witnesses—which I think we concur with,
given we have not had the chance to discuss this—that you
are very able people, very intelligent, bright, you know the swings
and roundabouts or, if you do not, you learn pretty damned quickly,
but lots of people do not.
Ms Hynard: You have to be immensely
tenacious as well.
* * *
Q1045 Derek Wyatt: They do not even
know what the PCC is, or what it stands for.
* * *
Q1046 Derek Wyatt: They have been
doorstepped and they just do not know what to do. They have no
money to go to court, or they do not know where to go. One of
the suggestions in the last session we had was that the PCC's
complaints system should be in public. Do you think that would
help? Like this, and anybody could come.
Q1047 Chairman: Except this is in
private.
* * *
Q1048 Derek Wyatt: We understand
that.
* * *
Q1049 Derek Wyatt: We understand
that. In other words, if there was an independent figure, should
it be an ombudsman, should it be a beefed-up PCC without any editors
on at all, just you and I and people like ourselves, not editors
or journalists, should they have the capacity to find, should
they be given the same space that you had and should they be given
the same space and the same headlines? How would we get it better?
Ms Hynard: I was quite thrown
by the question, because I never had a sense during the course
of the process of my complaint, that at any time anybody actually
sat down and made any decisions about it. I sent letters to the
Press Complaints Commission, which they forwarded to the consultant
editor of The Daily Mail who then wrote letters back to
Stephen Able, in this case, and I kept saying: "I press you
to adjudicate." I want there to be some kind of professional
body that sits down and makes a decision, or has some sanction,
or slaps them across the wrists, or whatever it is that they can
do. That was what I wanted but, in fact, I was pressed to accept
the final offer of The Daily Mail, which was to publish
an apology on page 31.
Q1050 Derek Wyatt: How would you
like it better? You say you do not want this to happen again.
We are trying to work this out ourselves.
Ms Hynard: Yes. There is no sense
that it has cost them anything in terms of loss of professional
credibility, money, anything.
Q1051 Rosemary McKenna: Thank you
very much for coming and giving evidence. It is something we are
taking very seriously. Ms Hynard, actually there are a couple
of comments in your letter here which are really important. Your
very last one: "I did get a retraction and an apology, but
it still feels like they got away with it." That is very
much reflected in what people have been saying to us in general,
that even a tiny apology and all of that kind of thing, they have
still got away with it. There is another thing that is worth exploring.
When you say that, however, what you really wanted was: "The
Commission to pass judgment on the case. For The Mail to
be held to account by its peers for its bad practice and made
to acknowledge its professional fault." Now, you see, that
would not help you.
Ms Hynard: No.
Q1052 Rosemary McKenna: You acknowledge
that. It does not recompense anything that happened to your family,
or the trauma, but what it would do is prevent it happening in
the future. Would that be a sense of satisfaction for you then
here, if we were able somehow to get some kind of resolution,
not to your individual cases, but how journalists behaved in future?
Ms Hynard: Yes. I felt that after
the end of our case I had absolutely no sense at all that this
was not going to happen again to somebody else, or that in any
way the brakes had been put on The Daily Mail. I think
that is what you were saying as well, was it not, for the benefit
of other people, that something needs to be done?
Q1053 Rosemary McKenna: No, and people,
not nearly as articulate as yourselves, just would not be able
to do this. You were able to have contact and to speak to someone
who gave you very sound advice.
* * *
Rosemary McKenna: You took up the case
and complained. That knowledge, although the PCC seem to say it
is out there, is not accessible to ordinary people. It is certainly
not going to help someone in your situation, Mr Hynard, when it
appears in the paper without your knowledge, without any comment
or without being spoken to. So the knowledge being out there,
which is what they say—and I do not know that it is accessible
at all—is not going to help in those situations if it is
written about an event which is a total misrepresentation.
Q1054 Chairman: There are two problems
there, are there not, Rosemary? Our previous witnesses' major
problem was how seriously misrepresented they were. In the case
of our guests here now, while they certainly would no doubt subscribe
to that, the real trauma they went through was the way they were
harassed; physical harassment to them, their friends, their neighbours,
in their house, on their telephone, et cetera. As I said on a
previous occasion, there has been an Act of Parliament which makes
it a criminal offence to beset people, and my guess is that if
our guests today had the recourse of being able to call the police,
and the police had come in response to a complaint about a potentially
criminal offence, then these people might well have gone away.
* * *
Q1055 Mr Bryant: Thanks very much
for coming along today. Do you think there was a need for an inquest?
In many countries there would not be an inquest following a case
such as this.
Mr Hynard: I think there was definitely
a need for an inquest in this case.
Q1056 Mr Bryant: Why was that?
Mr Hynard: Because of the extreme
nature of the death and the fact that there was so much that was
inexplicable about it. The fact that an apparently normal 16-year
old child could suddenly come back from work one evening and go
berserk, I would have thought an inquest would be the proper sort
of vehicle for looking into that.
Q1057 Mr Bryant: Most other countries
in the world have a national coroner's service, and part of the
coroner's service is managing the press in other countries in
the world. The coroner's service in this country is very busy
because the way it is constituted goes back to the 19th century.
Mr Hynard: There were aspects
of that that I think were unjust. The fact that the coroner in
his summing-up categorically said that there was no evidence that
drugs were a cause of Jimmy's behaviour that evening. The expert
witness said exactly the same thing and yet the reporter, sitting
in at the inquest, came up with an article which says: "Crazed
on drugs" the next day, and we had no legal redress seemingly.
The transcripts of the inquest, to refute what was actually said,
took a long time to get hold of and they cost us £300, which
I was not actually in a position to pay for at the time.
Ms Hynard: I was able to fight
the case on my notes that I took at the inquest. Steve was giving
evidence and I sat and took notes.
Mr Hynard: They wrote something
which actually was not said in the inquest and we had nothing
there to refute what was said.
Q1058 Mr Bryant: It is extraordinary,
is it not, that you should have to pay for the transcript of an
inquest?
Mr Hynard: In fact, the Health
Council did kindly volunteer to pay for it, but it would have
been difficult for me to pay for it at the time.
Q1059 Mr Bryant: That is something
which we should mention.
Ms Hynard: The only reason that
The Daily Mail stepped down at the end was because I said:
"I can show you the transcript", and that was when they
stepped down.
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