Success! The West Australian Newspaper Apologizes For Anti-Israel Crossword Puzzle

Following my post and the subsequent complaints – not just from many of you and yours truly, but also the Jewish Community Council of Western Australia – the West Australian newspaper has apologized for Saturday’s crossword puzzle containing overt anti-Israel propaganda.

Good afternoon,

I apologise it’s taken a little while to come back to you but, as I’m sure you’d appreciate, with something as important as this we wanted to make sure we had properly got to the bottom of it before making further comment.

The crossword was provided to us by Pagemasters. They have issued the following apology to us, and to you:

“To our valued customers at the West Australian and to their readers, in particular the Jewish Community Council of Western Australia. We sincerely apologise for the content that appeared in the July 23rd Big One Crossword. This puzzle was compiled by a former staff member who inserted content that was not appropriate for a general crossword puzzle. We let you down by not spotting this and will review all puzzles compiled by this former staffer, who has recently left our employment. Again our sincere apologies for any offence this has caused.”

I also wanted, in addition to the above, to reassure you that here at The West we take such matters very seriously.

We do check our third-party provided content as closely as we can, but unfortunately we are human and so things can be missed. In this case, we didn’t have the answers to the puzzle to cross-check with the clues. We have now arranged for these to be provided to us in future to try to avoid such issues moving forward.

Again, thank you for taking the time to bring this to our attention.

Kind regards,

Laura Newell

Readers’ Editor | Editorial

thewest.com.au | perthnow.com.au

This sounds like an unreserved apology (although it is uncanny how many times it is a “former staffer” responsible for these things!)

Time will tell whether they have, indeed, implemented a process change to ensure this never happens again. In the meantime, we’ll chalk this up as a success.