Graeme Colquhoun against the New Zealand Herald
Case Number: 3723
Council Meeting: 28 April 2025
Decision: Upheld
Publication: New Zealand Herald
Principle:
Accuracy, Fairness and Balance
Corrections
Ruling Categories:
Accuracy
Errors
Overview
1. Graeme Colquhoun has complained about a feature article published by the New Zealand Herald on July 20, 2024 headlined, “New Zealand’s worst murderers: More details released about longest serving inmates”. It is a follow-up to a feature published on May 4, 2024, headlined “New Zealand’s worst murderers: The men too dangerous for parole”.
The Article
2. The May feature runs through the 47 convicted murderers in New Zealand who have served more than 20 years in prison without parole. Two of the men and their crimes are described over a number of paragraphs but most get just a sentence or two each stating who they murdered and a brief outline of their offending. An unlabelled date is published beside each name. (The NZ Herald has told the Council it is the date they were sentenced). Graeme Colquhoun is one of a handful of men listed with just a name and date. His entry reads: “Graeme Colquhoun: June 1999”. The feature ends with a section explaining what a life sentence means in New Zealand.
3. The July feature, which is the focus of this complaint, begins with a brief news report on Christopher Foster, one of the 47 murderers named in the earlier story, being refused parole. It says three names were left off that list while the NZ Herald checked suppression orders and goes on to name them. It also contains details about seven men mentioned in the first story about whom the Herald had “little or no information”. That includes Mr Colquhoun. The details added about him say:
“Graeme Ross Colquhoun: June 1999
Police could find no information about the identity of the victim. However the Northern Advocate reported at the time that Colquhoun’s
victim was Ray Renata.
Renata was a tourist from Germany. She was found dead in her campervan at Opononi in 1999. Police believed Colquhoun killed her during an
attempted sexual assault.”
The Complaint
4. For context, the complaint from Graeme Colquhoun has played out over 10 months for several reasons. First, the complainant was in prison when the story was first published. He only became aware of it upon his release on parole, when people accused him of lying about his crime quoting the article as proof. When Mr Colquhoun was unable to resolve the issue with the NZ Herald and complained to the Media Council, he was back in prison and only being able to send letters by post. One November letter went in error to the NZ Medical Council and was only received by the Media Council in February. It then took several more weeks to get the necessary waiver from him, again via post. For those reasons the Media Council has agreed to consider the complaint even though it is ‘out of time’.
This complaint is being considered under Principle (1) Accuracy, Fairness and Balance, which says “publications should be bound at all times by accuracy…” and under Principle (12) Corrections, which says “significant errors should be promptly corrected with fair prominence. In some circumstances it will be appropriate to offer an apology…”
5. On October 18, 2024, lawyer Michelle Lander, acting for Mr Colquhoun, wrote to the New Zealand Herald complaining for the first time that the July feature named him as murdering a female tourist named Ray Renata. The letter reads: “This is a total fiction. He [sic] Colquhoun killed a male named Ray Renata. He was not a tourist. He was a local man. Could you please remove this from the article immediately?”
6. The NZ Herald replied four hours later thanking Lander for alerting them, saying “the error is being corrected now”.
7. Mr Colquhoun then sent a formal complaint to the NZ Media Council himself, dated November 11, 2024. He wrote “nothing has happened. The offending article can still be found on a multitude of websites”, including the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB. He says the factual errors are the crux of his complaint.
8. Mr Colquhoun included with his complaint a screenshot of the full July article with the timestamp “11/12/24 6.36am New Zealand’s worst murderers: More details revealed about longest-serving inmates – NZ Herald”. It includes incorrect facts and no correction. He also included a screenshot showing just his section of the July story uncorrected with a timestamp “10/18/24 9.43pm”. We take those dates to be shown in the American style as November 12 and October 18, respectively.
9. He wrote “the article includes statements about me that are factually incorrect and are defamatory… the only thing Anna Leask got right in her article about me was the name of my victim (who was male) and the location of my crime, Opononi. Everything else relating to me killing a woman tourist in 1999 was false. And how can I say that? Because in 1998 I was already in custody for the murder I had committed”.
10. He pointed out there was a “red flag” in the two contradictory sentences written about him. The reporter first writes “Police could find no information about the identity of the victim”, but then says “Police believed Colquhoun killed her during an attempted sexual assault”.
11. The complainant requested copies of any newspaper articles about his murder from the National Library and included them in his complaint. He received three articles, two from the NZ Herald and one from the Northern Advocate and supplied them to the Council. “There was absolutely no reference to me killing any woman tourist,” he says.
12. Mr Colquhoun continues that after 26 years in prison he had just been granted parole and released on October 30. The article was putting his reintegration into society at risk. “I am being confronted by people who state that I am a liar for what I told them as the reason I was in prison. These conversations have been very heated at times and have come seriously close to having me recalled back to prison”. They have been “in your face confrontations” and he had to rely on his parole papers to show people the article was wrong.
13. It was this letter that ended up with the NZ Medical Council, so did not reach the NZ Media Council until February 14, 2025.
14. The complainant wrote a hand-written letter to the Media Council dated November 30, 2024, reporting the article had brought him “unwanted negative attention, resulting in a change in behaviour, which resulted in my being recalled to prison”. He asked that all correspondence be sent to him by post to prison.
15. A further hand-written letter was sent on December 22, 2024 stating Corrections had told him it did not provide the NZ Herald with details of his case and another on February 20, 2025 supplying our waiver. The February letter also revealed he was recalled to prison on November 15, 2024. The complainant claimed the article was still online “a couple of weeks” after his recall as Corrections officers looked it up to understand his complaint. He wrote, “for me, the damage has been done”. The stress of the situation and “the backlash towards me resulting from the incorrect article” led him to using cannabis, which was a parole violation.
The Response
16. As noted in Paragraph 7, the NZ Herald replied to Mr Colquhoun’s lawyer on October 18 saying the story was being corrected that day.
17. The formal response to the Media Council on March 10 was brief. It asserted the story was corrected on October 18, 2024 within minutes of the email from Michelle Lander. The response included a screenshot of the bottom of the July article taken on March 10. The correction reads:
“The original version of this story stated that murder victim Ray Renata was a female tourist, who police believed was killed during an attempted sexual assault. Renata was a Northland man. The story has been amended to reflect that fact.”
18. The response continues, saying that now the complainant had been released on parole, the NZ Herald have “today removed all reference to him from the story, including the correction. We have also removed his name from an earlier story about killers denied parole”. It concludes saying the July 1999 date mentioned referred to the start of his sentence, not the date the crime was committed.
19. The response does not include any evidence of the correction at the time, the Northern Advocate article, or show how the two paragraphs on Mr Colquhoun were annotated, if at all.
The Discussion
20. This complaint has at times been a confusing one, not helped by the difficulty of dealing with a complainant in prison, a letter going to the wrong address, and conflicting claims by the complainant and NZ Herald. We should note then that we can only rely on the information provided from both parties. With that caveat, we will lay out what we know.
21. It appears that the NZ Herald included Mr Colquhoun’s name in the May article about New Zealand most dangerous murderers, even though it knew nothing about his case beyond his name and the date he was sentenced. The sentencing date included was not labelled, so readers would have been unclear whether the date referred to the date of the crime, sentencing or something else.
22. When the NZ Herald did fact-check Mr Colquhoun’s case for the July feature, police told them they knew nothing about the victim’s identity, but believed “she” was a victim of sexual assault. The NZ Herald printed this belief. They also say they relied on a Northern Advocate article for the victim’s name, however the Northern Advocate article about his crime supplied from the National Library does not contain the incorrect facts reported by the NZ Herald. Indeed, the articles supplied by the complainant show the NZ Herald’s own reporting from the time made it clear Ray Renata was a local man and, as such, those facts would have been on file.
23. It's clear the facts the NZ Herald reported in July were wrong. Mr Colquhoun’s victim was a local man, not a woman visiting from Germany. There was no suggestion of sexual assault being part of the crime. The Council notes the key fact in the story – that Mr Colquhoun is a convicted murderer who has spent more than 20 years in prison – is correct. However getting the details wrong and adding sexual offending to his crime are extremely serious errors, disrespectful to both Mr Colquhoun and his victim.
24. The NZ Herald says it corrected those facts on October 18, yet the complainant says on November 11 that “nothing has happened” and the article remained on multiple sites. He says in his February letter it was still online “a couple of weeks” after he was recalled to prison on November 15. What’s more, Mr Colquhoun has provided two screenshots – one from October, one from November – showing the uncorrected text on the NZ Herald, while the NZ Herald has provided nothing to back up their claim. So the evidence suggests the article was still online through October and November as Mr Colquhoun says, when it sparked several confrontations with people after he was released.
25. Mr Colquhoun also referenced Newstalk ZB in his complaint and the Council discovered the uncorrected story was still on the ZB website in February, when his complaint arrived. The Council informed the NZ Herald but still the inaccurate article was not taken down. We alerted them again in April and it was only then the article was removed.
26. Based on the information received and the fact the complainant is now back in prison, the Council considers the NZ Herald has committed serious breaches of two principles. Significant errors were made in both its reporting and corrections that have had a serious impact on the complainant’s life.
27. On accuracy, the NZ Herald headlined the feature “New Zealand’s worst murderers”, so fully understood the seriousness of the issues they were reporting on. The accusations being made of the men in the article were the most serious a news outlet could make. Yet in reporting on Mr Colquhoun, the NZ Herald relied on thin sources and uncertain information from police. It did not even check its own reporting from the time. This sloppy reporting meant they not only got the facts of the murder wrong, but they also accused Mr Colquhoun of being a sex offender.
28. It could be argued that Mr Colquhoun as a murderer has little reputation left to damage. However, from his own story, the NZ Herald’s errors did him and his reputation serious harm. While the paper could not have known Mr Colquhoun was about to be released, he says their errors sparked confrontations that made his reintegration to society so stressful, he turned to drugs and so breached his parole conditions. While the complainant has to take responsibility for his own actions in this matter, he did not deserve the NZ Herald making a hard transition even harder through its gross inaccuracies and poor correction process.
29. The evidence suggests the story was not corrected as the NZ Herald thinks. But whether or not the correction was at the bottom of the story, it was clearly not prominent enough or sufficiently annotated for Mr Colquhoun and the people who confronted him to understand the correct facts of the matter. We have not seen if the paper, for example, put an asterix beside the story. Certainly there was no asterix by the correction, suggesting that was not done. We also note that the July story listed 10 names, but the correction did not name which murderer it referred to and was placed at the bottom of the story. So it could have been confusing to readers which crime the correction was referring to.
30. What’s more, for an unknown period of time the correction remained at the bottom of the story even after the two paragraphs on Mr Colquhoun had been removed. Again, that confuses the reader rather than offering clarification. To cap it off, in March the paper then removed “all reference to him from the story”, giving the reason that he had been released on parole.
31. A good correction policy does not mean removing errors altogether. Mistakes need to be acknowledged and owned, not erased. In removing the section on Mr Colquhoun, the NZ Herald should have left a clear correction stating an earlier version of the story included incorrect facts. Further, it makes no sense removing Mr Colquhoun because he got parole. First, he was in fact back in prison in part because of the incorrect story and, second, unless the paper plans to change the story every time one of the men gets parole, it’s taking an inconsistent approach.
32. And in another serious failure, the NZ Herald failed to alert Newstalk ZB it was carrying an inaccurate story. That incorrect story calling the complainant a sex offender was online for nine months. It remained online for weeks even after the Media Council alerted the NZ Herald to the issue. It was removed during the Council’s consideration of the complaint when the Council alerted the NZ Herald for a second time.
33. In summary, at each step the NZ Herald has handled this correction poorly and its efforts fall well short of Media Council standards. As with the inaccurate reporting, the mishandling of the correction has had a seriously detrimental impact on the complainant’s life. The NZ Herald should consider the seriousness of this breach and review its corrections process so this cannot happen again.
Decision:
34. The NZ Herald’s inaccurate reporting and poor correcting are worthy of stern criticism. The Council often deals with complaints where sub-standard reporting creates hurt and harm to a person’s life, but seldom where it contributes, in part, to the loss of a person’s liberty.
35. The complaint is upheld under Principle (1) and Principle (12) by unanimous decision. The Council considers the correction failures in this case warrant an apology to the complainant.
Council members considering the complaint were Hon Raynor Asher (Chair), Hank Schouten, Rosemary Barraclough, Guy MacGibbon, Tim Watkin,
Ben France-Hudson, Jo Cribb, Judi Jones, Alison Thom, Richard Pamatatau.
Katrina Bennett declared a conflict of interest and did not vote.