We wrote earlier this month about the Irish Broadcasting Authority’s ruling that Irish public broadcaster RTE was both misleading and inaccurate in its report on what has been called the Corrib “rape tape.” The tape was inadvertently made when a camcorder recorded arresting officers “joking about raping [two arrested] women if they refused to give their name and address.” The women were arrested after a protest of Shell’s Corrib gas pipeline.
While RTE had suggested in its reports that a police investigation into the tape found that deleted files related to the conversation, the police investigation found otherwise. As part of the Broadcasting Authority’s ruling, RTE had to air its correction Dec. 7, Irish news site the Journal reported.
We wrote to RTE’s Carolyn Fisher asking more about the correction, as we were unable to find it online. Fisher told us that RTE did air the Broadcasting Authority’s ruling Dec. 7 “before the Six One and Nine pm News programmes.” Airing the ruling is “a statutory obligation that we must follow when a complaint against us is upheld,” she explained.
Fisher noted that RTE hasn’t commented on the complaint otherwise, but that she did add that the complaint was “in connection with a lead in to a report and not to the report itself and the issue was one of imprecise phraseology in this lead in.” Fisher explained that the imprecise lead-in only aired during the Six One program and that RTE “amended” its lead-in for the 9 p.m. broadcast.