By Gabriel Princewill-
John Stephenson Wright a Paedophile, has sensationally won a complaint against a regional daily newspaper after the paper confused a child he had raped with another of his victims.
Paedo, John Stephenson, serving more than 19 years for sex offences against three children, complained against the Manchester Evening Newspaper for erroneously stating in an article they wrote that he had raped an under-aged boy who later became a police officer and that he had abused two others.
The then under-aged boy, now a police officer called Darren Kenny, had waved his right to anonymity and spoken to the Manchester(MEN) Newspaper about his past ordeal in the hands of the depraved paedophile.
The Independent Press Standards Organisation criticized the Manchester Evening News after the complaint by Wright, who unsuccessfully attempted to have his sentence reduced by the courts.
In his complaint to IPSO, made under Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice, Wright complained his convictions for rape related to another individual, emphasizing that his conviction had been for sexually abusing Mr Kenny, not raping him.
In response, the Manchester paper stated that in light of the seriousness of the complainant’s convictions, it did not believe that reporting he had been found guilty of raping this individual, when in fact he had sexually abused him and raped another, represented a significant inaccuracy.
The paper admitted that a member of its editorial staff had assumed that the individual who had waived his right to anonymity had been the individual who had been raped.
However, the paper confirmed that once it had become aware of the correct position it had offered to publish a correction on this point.
IPSO concluded that the paper had not taken any steps to verify which of the convictions related to Mr Kenny, and that presuming Wright had been convicted for raping him represented a failure to take care of the story’s accuracy. The Code Committee ruled that the correction should now be published to avoid a further breach of Code. Ipso’s conclusion is factually correct; every publication has a professional and ethical duty to publish accurate information, no matter the class of persons covered in a story, or the level of their culpability in a criminal offence.
However, it beggars belief that a vile paedophile would complain about the distinction between raping a victim and sexually abusing them in a way technically falling short of the precise definition of rape. Altering the story to fit in with the facts would have barely taken minutes to rectify, but evil Wright still has many more years to rot in jail. Perhaps he feels better than the world now knows he sexually abused the boy, and not raped him, but a big fool he is, if he thinks public perception of him will improve due to the correction of the facts.
Ipso was contacted for a comment but didn’t get back by the time of publication.
