Compare how two authors deal with book reviews that they believe to be defamatory.
First, Chris McGrath, author of “The Attempted Murder of God: Hidden Science You Really Need to Know” took blogger Vaughan Jones to the High Court over a review that Jones posted on the Amazon website, of all places. The judgement on whether this case can proceed is expected today.
Historian Niall Ferguson was similarly upset by a negative review. His book Civilisation was eviscerated by Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books (a much more credible and prominent platform than Amazon’s product review pages). Ferguson felt he had been defamed as a racist. However, in contrast to Chris McGrath, Ferguson chose a different forum to express his grievance and demand satisfaction – the letters page.
This approach – fighting words with more words – is precisely the kind of counter-speech I advocated in my ‘Way of The Blogs‘ piece for the Guardian a couple of years ago. It offers a form of redress to the aggrieved person, while avoiding censorship, and it is also much cheaper. I think it is a much classier way of dealing with critics, than hauling them down to the Royal Courts of Justice.
Tag: libel (Page 4 of 4)
And now for some Inside Baseball.
Last week, I managed to irritate legal blogger Jack of Kent (a.k.a. David Allen Green) by suggesting he was being stingy with his links, and then not telling him about it. This was not entirely true on either count – He was not being as unlinky as I had thought; and I had tried to let him know.
Since David and I have worked together on the Libel Reform Campaign, I assume that he is not going to sue me for trashing his reputation in the Guardian. However, elements of our exchange got me thinking about issues of ‘responsibility’ in blogging.
Here’s the thing: When David asked me “why didn’t you check?” I felt strangely short-changed, despitre the fact that I certainly had not checked with him beforehand. This is because when I typed the original post, I fully expected David to become aware of it. Incoming links and twitter recommendations usually alert people to the fact they are being discussed. Moreover, I think some part of my subconsicious decided that to cite him was, in effect, an invitation to respond. The invitation was not explicit, but to me it feels like an integral part of the blogging conversation.
I write this not to try and get myself off the hook for the pint I know I must pay to David, but instead to ask how responsible blogging might be different from responsible journalism. A key pillar of the existing Reynolds Defence (a public interest defence for libellous statements) is the idea of verification before publishing. But should this hold for bloggers? What of the idea (which I had internalised until David complained) that the early publishing of comment or allegations on a blog or twitter, is in itself part of the verification and fact-checking process? For citizen bloggers, publishing a claim online carries the implicit (and often explicit) request – “please help me verify”.
Mainstream media critics of blogging, and the politicians, certainly disagree, and see the publication of anything unchecked as being irresponsible. I would appreciate thoughts on this from The Man Himself – Could this form of early publication online be considered ‘responsible’, due to the very nature of the medium?
Emotions play a big part in many complaints against the press. Invasions of privacy undoubtedly hurt a person’s feelings, and often a person’s sense of their damaged reputation is related to how they think other people perceive them. In many cases, all the wronged party seeks is a correction in the newspaper. They would happily forgo substantial financial damages if only the newspaper would apologise and publish a correction. The BBC’s current series See You In Court makes this point very clearly in the case of Sheryl Gascoigne, smeared by three tabloid papers.
Unfortunately, “equal prominence” corrections cause problems for the press. Newspaper editors are often reluctant to publish corrections, because it weakens their credibility, and damages the editorial control they feel they have a right to retain. Very often, news companies would prefer to pay damages and keep quiet about a mistake, rather than print an apology. When the corrections do come, they often seem unsatisfactory to the claimant, buried within the paper.
I have been experimenting with Flipboard and Instapaper this week, two iPad applications which pull content from sources on the web, and repackage it in their own typographic design. This is only possible because web designers have realised that their content must be “platform agnostic”. Design and Content are now kept totally separate in the digital world. These are the fruits of a battle fought and won against <table> layouts and text embedded in JPEGs (see my Creative Review letter of 2005 for more on this).
It occurred to me that in 2011, news organisations can afford to make all their content similarly agnostic, at very little extra cost. Currently, when they publish a correction, they routinely do so somewhere obscure in the paper, and on an equally obscure page on the website. But Flipboard reminds us that the newspapers are not bound by how their content is displayed online. Modern technology and cheap digital printing means this same flexibility applies offline, too. Just as I can enlarge the font on a web-browser so everything appears in 40pt Arial, so content printed in the middle pages can be brought to prominence too. I think a few well placed instructions in this area, from the PCC to the newspapers they regulate, could reap psychological dividends for the complainants at no extra cost.
My idea: when the PCC rules against a paper and orders an apology, the paper will print that apology as usual. However, it also publishes, online in PDF form, a redesigned version of then same article. The alternative design template carries the style sheet of the front page of the paper, complete with masthead and a big bold typeface. This PDF is formally ‘published’ by the newspaper, with it’s own ISSN – derivatives of the papers main ISSN are available for electronic editions and supplements.
I’ve mocked up an example, using a recent clarification English PEN secured from The Sun, following a complaint to the PCC. The first image is the actual clarification as it appeared in the newspaper. The second is the same text, redesigned by me.
What this means is that the redesigned apology can be reprinted, reproduced and distributed by the claimant and anyone else who wishes to comment on the story. This satisfies the crucial psychological itch at the heart of many complaints to the libel courts and the PCC.
Meanwhile, the editors and publishers retain control over the design of the main printed product they put on sale, and the cost of creating a supplementary version of their article is zero (you would just type in a reference to an article and click ‘generate’). In previous times, designing and printing an alternative design was prohibitively expensive. Now the cost is trivial, meaning publishers would have no grounds to refuse to perform such a repackaging. This idea isn’t perfect, but it would offer more redress than the current process.
Question: Does compelling a publisher to re-issue something they have published, but with a different design, constitute an infringement of free expression?