Defamation and inflammatory words
Australia proves once again it has some of the most amusing defamation cases; media upheaval in NZ opens an opportunity
Lessons aplenty in Australian defamation extravaganza
It is a truism of defamation law and occasionally called out by acerbic judges that in order to be defamed you have to have a reputation worth defending.
A case in Australia has again proved the truth of that aphorism and shown yet again that New South Wales is a world leader in defamation for good and ill.
“Having escaped the lion’s den, Mr [Bruce] Lehrmann made the mistake of going back for his hat,” Justice Michael Lee said in one of many damning remarks about the plaintiff in a defamation case against a broadcaster who took the case having escaped conviction in a criminal trial over an alleged rape in the Australian parliament.
Here’s an open access piece from The Guardian on the sorry tale of the alleged rape or just plain sordid antics of Lehrmann and other political staffers and the whole mess.
“The risible quality of his lies ensured that he was doomed. It took a well-equipped, forensic judge to unstitch Lehrmann,” legal writer Richard Ackland wrote.
“This is a remarkable judgment because it is only one of very few where the media has successfully defended a defamation action in the federal court,” he said, going on to outline the sorry trend for media companies to lose big defamation cases.
One day of gains for the media might turn into a rather different day for Channel Seven which rather foolishly got swept away by social media claims to have identified a Jewish Sydney man, Benjamin Cohen, as the culprit in the mall killings last week.
Inevitably, the lawyer described by the Australian Financial Review as the country’s “foremost defo warrior”, Rebekah Giles had taken Cohen on as a client, having also been heavily involved in the Lehrmann case, as columnist Mark Di Stefano wrote: “Cohen (with Giles in his corner) appears to be naturally now seeking financial damages for the egregious error.”
Puns can still work
The Guardian has outdone itself lately with a couple of punning headlines that are so simple they make you smile.
“Fake snooze” was part of the lead in to Donald Trump allegedly inspecting his eyelids during jury selection in the first criminal trial of a former president in US history. The introduction to the story wasn’t terrible: ‘Sleepy Joe, meet dozing Don.’
Another doozy was a record on an Australian sheep that had finally been caught and shorn after years having been what The Guardian said was “On the lam…”
When style meets reality in news
It’s not uncommon in big newsrooms and during big stories for editors to remind staff that certain words can generate more heat than light or are better in a quote than in the body of the text and therefore reflecting the theoretical objectivity of the reporter.
The New York Times whose spectacular glass-fronted Renzo Piano-designed office building in New York is a metaphor for its theoretical transparency as well as the gold-fish-bowl atmosphere of its newsroom has walked into controversy about just such a style reminder. Inevitably, it is about Gaza and Israel and in some cases arguably does reflect the paper’s long-standing editorial support for Israel.
However, I suspect there is less to The Intercept report than it seems. I have written many similar notes — sometimes daily to reporters at Reuters News Agency — when stories and words become contentious. It is often about Israel and driven partly by the seemingly endless number of groups that monitor media to defend Israel in the media. They are incredibly persistent and every now and then correct, which is not to say that every call from a pro-Israel media monitoring group led to a note to staff.
The New York Times memo reported by The Intercept urged reporters to take care using the word “genocide”, for example. Editors are right in my view to say that: it is a crime and it requires evidence if you choose to use it outside a quote from someone. In the Gaza case, however, it seems perfectly reasonable to use the phrase the International Court of Justice used when accepting the case genocidal acts might have been committed by Israeli forces as “plausible”.
The injunction against the use of “occupied territory” — seemingly as opposed to “the” Occupied Territories which are well-defined and against “refugee camps” is a little more tenuous though it is true those camps are now well-established (now destroyed in fact) cities rather than collections of tents.
At the same time, The Intercept has also called out The New York Times and others for the language they used to describe the Hamas attacks of October 7 that provoked the Israeli backlash, reporting that inflammatory words associated with the Israeli narrative dominated coverage of the Hamas attacks.
ENDS/pgb