I really should have become immune to the deplorable state of the Guardian Reader's Editor column by now, but Siobhain Butterworth's piece today was just one fatuous effusion too many for this reader. I took the time to comment:

Here's a funny story. In December last year, I emailed the editor and reader's editor to ask why the paper had understated the scale of deaths caused by the Iraq war by a factor of 17. It was not the first time I had written on the subject. I got no reply. In order to get any kind of acknowledgement at all, I had to go to the Press Complaints Commission. Finally, the paper published a highly disingenuous correction.

Had the paper, say, understated the number of victims of the Holocaust by a factor of 17, do you think you might have heard about it? Would it take a PCC complaint even to get an acknowledgement? Would the paper then note (just as accurately, in fact) that the figure was "subject to dispute"?

Still, as long as the Reader's Editor is devoting a sizeable portion of this column to the correct definition of "tea", whether a man's arse should appear on the front page, spelling mistakes, how precisely to refer to people's names, and whether the phrase "bored by" is preferable to "bored of", at least we can rest assured that any "significant error or breach of ethical standards" will be taken deadly seriously.

Sad to relate, but time was when the Reader's Editor position wasn't as much of a joke as it currently is, particularly under the former holder of the post Ian Mayes. That period of relative accountability and responsiveness now appears to have come to an end.

No doubt Butterworth would protest, on the basis of the polling evidence she adduces today:

The Guardian reader survey contains further evidence that readers think the internal ombudsman system of self-regulation is a good thing; 62% of readers who took part said they were aware that the Guardian has a readers' editor and 81% of them felt this made the paper more responsive to their views.

But even were this not to extrapolate an insupportable conclusion from a dubiously-selected survey sample, the question is whether the paper would be more responsive with a reader's editor or with no reader's editor at all. One is reminded of the famous Malcolm X quip about having an attacker bury a knife nine inches deep in one's back and subsequently pull it out three inches, as if the latter was somehow doing the victim a favour. The issue is not whether the Reader's Editor is better than nothing at all (whether, in other words, they provide next to no accountability rather than no accountability); it is whether the Reader's Editor does the job for which they claim to have been appointed at all adequately. The evidence noted above, I would suggest, goes some way to answering that question.

UPDATE: Butterworth got back to me:

Notbored: I am aware that you made a PCC complaint and that a correction was published. I'm sorry that your complaint slipped through the net in December. I'm not sure why. Your list doesn't mention my columns about: the death count in Iraq, the number of people who died during the Mau Mau uprising in the 50s; the eiffel tower story that turned out to be untrue; treatment of transsexuals in an illustrated column; the way people with special needs were written about in a Society column; the opinion piece by Morgan Tsvangirai that turned out to have been written by someone else and others relating to more serious subjects. See my comments above in relation to the columns on lighter subjects.

This was my response:

Siobhain: You mention a number of pieces on "more serious subjects". Just to take the example of the piece on Iraq mortality, however, is rather instructive: in fact, far from providing a reasonable defence, the piece is a perfect illustration of the double-standard applied by the paper in this area - as indeed was the correction ultimately printed as the result of the PCC complaint. The figure for mortality in the DRC, obtained by precisely the same method and by the same team, has not been subject to the level of doubts and qualifications liberally heaped on the Lancet's Iraq study (never mind the ORB study). All the more surprising, as I have noted again and again, since the point has already been made in the Guardian itself by George Monbiot - in 2005.

You write:

See my comments above in relation to the columns on lighter subjects.

Yet the principle laid out in those comments is entirely congruent with the grounds of my complaint. As you wrote:

A large volume of emails can indicate a level of irritation among readers and it may mean that a journalist has got something badly wrong, but it may also be the product of a lobby from one side of a social or political issue, and the people sending the emails may not have seen the content they're complaining about. The only question in every case is whether there is a significant error or breach of ethical standards.

The only question is whether there has been a significant error or breach of ethical standards. That being so, what are we to make of the columns on subjects from spelling mistakes to hair-splitting commentary on how to refer to people's names? Doesn't the triviality of these subjects in fact, by your own standards, represent a major abdication of your responsibilities as Reader's Editor? I say this not in the spirit of mindless petulance, incidentally, but in the hope that things might improve, especially in areas for which the paper, like every paper, has a fundamental responsibility to uphold "ethical standards" - in providing the public with the information that would allow them to exercise their democratic rights and hold power to account.

Thank you for the apology regarding my complaint. I can only speculate as to why it did indeed "slip through the net", as you put it. It is surely worth noting, however, that a recent offer to Comment Is Free on the part of the campaign group Media Lens was rejected with words to the effect of "why would we want to publish anything from you"; while an article by a very distinguished professor in the field of media was rejected last week with the words "it would be read as a piece of old lefty whingeing about bias" (ironically, one of the main points of the piece concerned recent polling evidence of overwhelming public support for such currently marginal voices being reflected in news coverage, as part of the normal range of opinion). I can't help thinking there may be a connection. It's certainly something the Reader's Editor ought to look into.

The distinguished Professor in question is Glasgow University's Greg Philo, who has made a major contribution to this area, and whose recent book on British television coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict was highly praised by (among others) Avi Shlaim, perhaps the most distinguished historian of the conflict. The piece he wrote for the paper, and the comments provided with it, are well worth reading. In particular, they provide some insight into what the public expect of the media, and the ways in which, time and time again, we are being badly let down.