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New York Times apologises for article about Irish student deaths

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New York Times apologises for article about Irish student deaths accused of 'victim-blaming'

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Spokesman said it regretted if readers believed article was insensitive

Andrew Buncombe
New York
Thursday 18 June 2015

A major US newspaper has apologised over what its own ombudsman said was an “insensitive” article about the death of six Irish students in a building collapse amid a flurry of complaints that said the report had blamed the victims.

The public ombudsman of the New York Times said she had received “hundreds” of complaints about the article on the building collapse and the death of the students. Five of the young people were from Ireland while the sixth was a joint US-Irish citizen who lived in California.

The Irish Ambassador to Ireland, Anne Anderson, was among those who criticised the report and published an open letter on Wednesday in which she said the inference of the article had caused “great offence”.

Ombudsman Margaret Sullivan said the complaints focussed on part of the report which talked about the J-1 visa programme, which has long enabled Irish students to spend summers working in the US.

The report claimed the programme was not just a “source of aspiration, but a source of embarrassment for Ireland, marked by a series of high-profile episodes involving drunken partying and the wrecking of apartments in places like San Francisco and Santa Barbara”.

“My office fielded hundreds of complaints Wednesday from readers who are – quite understandably – upset about an article that went online Tuesday night,” Ms Sullivan wrote.

She added: “Those who wrote and tweeted called this, and other passages in the story, “victim-blaming”. The real problem, they said, was structural defects in the building.

“And they objected to depicting the young people as extreme partyers, in part because it perpetuates a stereotype.”

She said that one of the people who had contacted her to complain was Brendan O’Sullivan, a former member of the J-1 programme, who had told her: “The only thing missing [from the story was] a picture of a pint and a kid with red hair falling down drunk.”

The young people died in the city of Berkeley after the fourth-floor balcony they were standing on collapsed during a party in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Philip Grant, the Consul General of Ireland to the Western United States, said the incident had left people “frozen in shock and disbelief”.

The young people were named as Ashley Donohoe, 22, who had joint citizenship, and Irish citizens Olivia Burke, 21, Eoghan Culligan, 21, Niccolai Schuster, 21, Lorcan Miller, 21, and 21-year-old Eimear Walsh.

In her open letter, Ms Anderson said it was “quite wrong” to say the J1 visa programme was “a source of embarrassment for Ireland”. She added: “On the contrary, we are fully supportive of this programme and we know that it brings enormous mutual benefit.”

Ms Sullivan said she had spoken to the editors and reporters involved in the article they were “well aware of the storm” it had created.

She said she spoken to the paper’s national editor, Alison Mitchell, who said she regretted that readers believed the newspaper had set out to the blame the victims as that “was never the intention”.

She also said she had spoken with a reporter who was involved in writing the article. He said that the intention of the article, written on the second day of the news cycle, “was to focus on the programme”.

There are obviously positive aspects to the programme, which has been a great resource for thousands of young Irish students, as well as negative ones,” she quoted reporter Adam Nagourney, as saying.

“Looking back, I had the balance wrong; I put too much emphasis on the negative aspects, and they were too high in my story. That did not become clear to me until I got a distraught email from a reader right after the story posted.”

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Visitors lay flowers on a makeshift memorial near the scene of a 4th-story apartment building balcony collapse in Berkeley, California Visitors lay flowers on a makeshift memorial near the scene of a 4th-story apartment building balcony collapse in Berkeley, California

Eileen Murphy, the newspaper’s spokeswoman, issued a statement that said the Times agreed some of the language in the article could be interpreted as “insensitive”.

“It was never our intention to blame the victims and we apologise if the piece left that impression,” she added. “We will continue to cover this story and report on the young people who lost their lives.”


 
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