U.K. media watchdog Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO) determined Friday that Jeremy Clarkson’s controversial Meghan Markle column for The Sun “contained a pejorative and prejudicial reference to the Duchess’ sex,” breaching the Editors’ Code of Practice clause on discrimination.
The decision regarding Clarkson’s article, titled “One day, Harold the glove puppet will tell the truth about A Woman Talking B*ks,” upheld a pair of complaints from women’s rights charities, The Fawcett Society and The WILDE Foundation — which in themselves amounted to just a fraction of the more than 25,100 public complaints lodged following the column’s December publication.
IPSO, the independent regulator of the majority of the newspaper, magazine and digital news industry in the U.K., instructed the Sun as a result of its ruling to print its summary of the charges filed against it on the same page Clarkson’s column would typically run. It also determined that that summary be flagged on the paper’s front page in print and on its website.
The watchdog org said it had launched an investigation into Clarkson’s Dec. 17 column in February. While the results of that investigation found Clarkson and The Sun responsible for breaching Clause 12 on discrimination of sex, it did not uphold other elements of the complaints against the article, including that it discriminated against Markle based on race, that it harassed Markle or that it was inaccurate.
In the ruling, Lord Faulks, chair of IPSO, said, “We found that the imagery employed by the columnist in this article was humiliating and degrading toward the Duchess. IPSO’s purpose is to protect the public and freedom of expression by upholding high editorial standards. In this case, The Sun failed to meet these standards.”
“The Editors’ Code of Practice protects the right of commentators to challenge, to shock, be satirical and entertain, but it states that the press must avoid discriminatory references towards an individual,” IPSO chief executive Charlotte Dewar added.
The column memorably featured comments from Clarkson that stated that he hated Markle on a “cellular level” and that he was waiting for the day that Markle would “parade naked through the streets of every town in Britain while crowds chant, ‘Shame!,’” referencing a scene from HBO’s series “Game of Thrones.”
The blowback was swift, with several rounds of public apologies made by Clarkson and the studios that employ the commentator and host, Amazon (“Clarkson’s Farm”) and ITV (“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”) distancing themselves from the matter. The future of said programming remains in the balance.
Read IPSO’s ruling in full here.
