The Only Way is Ethics: This week we received a rare complaint about sports coverage

We were accused of using a slur against the Traveller community when covering a Liverpool-Manchester United football match

Man U look dejected (GETTY IMAGES)

Complaints about sports coverage are relatively rare. Readers who pick up Saturday’s first edition of The Independent in print are occasionally miffed to discover there is no report from an evening kick-off the night before – but timings mean we have no alternative. Another bugbear is an alleged failure to give sufficient prominence to women’s sport. There may be something in that, although things are on the up.

Recently however, a reader was aggrieved by a passing reference in an article about Liverpool and Manchester United’s meeting in the Europa Cup. Both teams were doing their best to show how much they cared about European football’s secondary competition. The clubs were, we said, acting rather like “two itinerants squabbling over the last dregs of a cheap bottle of lager”. This, suggested the reader, looked suspiciously like a discriminatory reference to the Traveller community.

I’m sure that was not the intention. An itinerant, an individual who moves from place to place, need not be a Gypsy or Irish Traveller or from any other community designated officially as a minority ethnic group. That said, members of those communities might (but only might) describe their lifestyles as “itinerant” and there is at the least room for some confusion.

Moreover, the idea of two itinerants fighting over the remains of some cheap beer does tap into a rather uncomfortable stereotype. Are all wandering souls also drunks? In popular presentations perhaps, particularly in a bygone age, but it feels a bit old hat – even if on this occasion it was very much done with tongue in cheek. The fact that the comparison was made in the context of a sports report is neither here nor there: the same fundamental considerations apply across our editorial output.

Moving to the online world

This column is itinerant to the extent that it will soon wander to the online world, having focused largely – though not exclusively – on The Independent’s print content for the past two years.

Many of the issues which readers raise with me are, in fact, not platform-specific. When last year we published haunting images of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian refugee whose lifeless body was found on a Turkish beach, web users and print readers responded in equal measure. Just as some felt we had erred when publishing his picture on the front page of the paper, so others were upset to be confronted by it on the homepage of our website. It’s worth noting that the deliberations which went into our decision-making were essentially the same in the paper and digital arenas.

Likewise, a change of editorial tack on a key policy issue will often provoke a similar response among those reading online and print traditionalists. The debate around The Independent’s general election leader in 2015 was not confined to the paper-edition audience.

If there is a difference between complaints stemming from print articles and those referring to web material, it is largely a consequence of the way readers arrive at material. Readers of the print edition have chosen to buy it because they generally want to read the whole paper. Online, people often dip in an out. If we see something on a website we don’t like we don’t just turn the page – rather, we click on the “complaints” link. Sometimes – heaven forfend – people read an article online specifically to disagree with it and to protest.

In the end, there is no less imperative in a digital environment than in a print one to get things right and to make wise editorial decisions.