Libel damages back with a bang

July 27, 2011
Seven Days In The Art World

Just when it seemed that large libel payouts were a thing of the past, along comes a High Court ruling ordering the Telegraph to part with a six-figure sum. Well, six figures in American dollars, anyway.

The Telegraph lost an action for libel and malicious falsehood brought by Sarah Thornton, author of Seven Days in the Art World. The paper now owes Thornton $100,000, or, to put this in its less sensational domestic currency, £65,000.

It’s a lot of money either way, and remarkably it’s arisen on the back of a book review. We know, we know – it’s almost impossible to libel someone in a book review, or rather, it’s almost impossible to libel someone indefensibly in a book review, such is the effect of the fair comment defence. But while fair comment protects the publication of robust, even intemperate opinions, it’s only effective if the underlying facts upon which the review is based are true.

In this instance, it appears that the Telegraph’s reviewer, Lynn Barber, was listed as one of the 250 people Thornton had interviewed for her book, but that Barber wrote in her review that no such interview had taken place. As the watchful LA Times put it: “Thornton was able to prove that she had conducted a 30-minute phone interview with Barber two years before, and in Tuesday’s judgment, the judge wrote that Barber knew her claim of not being interviewed was false”.

So there you have it. One false move in a review, and you can be £65,000 in the red. Mind you, while Thornton hails the matter as one of “journalistic integrity”, pointing out that the broadsheets can be just as cavalier as the tabloids, the Telegraph plans to appeal. We shall await developments with interest.

 

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If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.