Day 186 - 10 Nov 95 - Page 10
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2 People are not going to assume that those are the meanings
3 of the headings. They are going to read the text to find
4 out what, if anything, they mean. The headings are
5 basically there to give some kind of an indication of the
6 issues that are covered in the leaflet. The very most that
7 they can do is to associate McDonald's with that word. As
8 I have said, there is no quantity; it is simply an
9 association, what are they associated with, but not how or
10 to what extent. You have to read the text to find out what
11 the association is. Therefore, the arches with the "Mc"
12 whatever cannot have a stronger meaning than what the text
13 is, which is what the Plaintiffs are proposing.
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15 They are proposing that the arches give a stronger meaning
16 than that given in the text. If the association was
17 thought to be food, in the case of cancer, then it is clear
18 from the text of the leaflet that the association of the
19 two words is because of the high fat content, etcetera, of
20 the food and because they promote hamburgers and increase
21 consumption of such foods generally and thereby affect
22 people's diets.
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24 I think that even if it was considered to be referring to
25 food, headlines are generally always abbreviated and
26 designed to catch the eye to give a flavour of what is
27 going to be covered, the topics that are going to be
28 covered. As in the Charleston case, the reasonable reader
29 is one who would read the text to find out the meaning of
30 the heading.
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32 I would just say basically that no-one reading the banner
33 and then reading the text would read "McCancer" as meaning
34 "McDonald's cause cancer".
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36 Going on to the cartoon, I would say this is really the
37 same situation, that the cartoon does not add anything to
38 the text of the leaflet. I said on the previous occasion
39 that the cartoon depicted to me a symbolic crushing of both
40 people and animals, basically of the burger industry
41 consuming and swallowing up anything getting in the way of
42 it making its profits or anything that it needs to make its
43 profits. I do not think that the average person in the
44 street would take the cartoon literally.
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46 When people look at cartoons, they do not take them in
47 their literal sense. I mean, just to give an example,
48 there are frequent cartoons of John Major walking around in
49 his underpants, but nobody, absolutely nobody, believes
50 that he walks around with his underpants on outside his
51 trousers, or believes that that is what the cartoonist was
52 trying to say.
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54 I wanted to refer to some other cartoons, just by way of an
55 example. I may not refer to them all, but I will hand them
56 all up. I think there is one which I think Mr. Morris
57 might be referring to. (Handed) I particularly wanted
58 to refer to the one with the "speciality cuts", "Treasury
59 butchers" on it, because I think that this is really quite
60 a parallel to the cartoon in the fact sheet, except that
