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Pulled! The newspaper column that never happened

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Well now - Here's an odd one.

A national newspaper recently published an article about alleged failures by a previous incarnation of the Parish Council in my village, which (they claimed) led to bodies being buried in the wrong place in our local cemetery, along with other supposed misdemeanours.

You can read the somewhat sensationalised story here, which was provocatively titled "The 'Bermuda Triangle' cemetery where corpses vanished... and bereaved tended the wrong graves".

I was also made aware, by way of my links to the Parish Council through my role as Chair of the Allotment Tenants' Association, that several current Councillors had resigned, because of issues around this story and the events linked to it.

In my column (for the Northwest Evening Mail edition to be published on the 1st of August), I was critical of the paper that published the article as I felt it had helped to precipitate the resignations of good people, who were keenly working to resolve issues relating to the Allotments that the previous group has been unable to do, along with other good work in the village.

Unfortunately, the NWEM and it's legal department felt that, by repeating some of the allegations from the original story, they were liable to being sued by former members of the Council.

I'd hoped that I'd made it clear enough that these were the allegations of a newspaper whose views and reporting I strongly dislike, but it seems repeating them, even with context, is still legally dodgy.

I submitted the column Wednesday evening, and got the message it was being pulled Thursday afternoon.

Lesson learnt - I'll stick to criticising the weather and wind chime owners, and continue my campaign to make Sheena Easton into an icon, plus eulogising about the joys of kitten pictures on the internet.

(Chillaxing to a Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin & Sammy Davis Jr. CD right now. Smooth.)
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