Qualified Privilege

Last week's Media Law lecture was fascinating.  The defence of Qualified Privilege is one that journalists, especially investigative reporters, fall back upon, and the notes on the website ( http://journalism.winchester.ac.uk/?page=228 ), the BBC College of Journalism ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/journalism/law/reynolds-defence/the-impact-of-the-case.shtml ), and in Mc Nae's are sufficiently good for it to be a waste to simply repeat them here.

However, the area where alarm bells rang for me was an aspect of the Jameel case.  In that case The Wall Street Journal had reported that a Saudi company, Abdul Latif Jameel, was being monitored by the Saudi authorities at the request of the US.  The company complained that the article implied that it was involved in funding terrorism.  The paper couldn't prove its allegation so it fell back upon the Reynolds Defence that what it had done was in the public interest. Initially, Jameel won the case on the grounds that the phrase 'responsible journalism' was a subjective one, but on appeal the decision was reversed, with Lord Hoffman saying that he wasn't sure what 'subjective' meant in this context other than that it was being used as a term of disapproval....'the standard of responsible journalism is as objective and no more vague than standards such as 'reasonable care' which are regularly used in other branches of law ... so the standard of responsible journalism is made more specific by the Code of Practice which has been adopted by the newspapers and ratified by the Press Complaints Commission.'



What rang the alarm bells was that this could be seen by journalists as an invitation to try to use this to justify anything that they fancy writing, whereas the test will remain whether the public interest is truly being served.  The Jameel case, although hugely significant, doesn't remove the need for publication to genuinely be in the public interest - trying to use this as a defence after defaming a footballer or a pop star because the revelations about their private life were supposedly in the public interest would be highly unlikely to succeed - Jameel is to be used as a precedent for defnding serious matters, not frivolous ones.