Day 177 - 26 Oct 95 - Page 42


     
     1             the case."
     2
     3             Can I pause there -- and perhaps this is a neater way
     4        of doing it than I had originally intended -- to say just a
     5        few words about headlines.  I am not going to read from
     6        English and Scottish Co-operative Properties Mortgage and
     7        Investment Society Ltd. v. Odhams Press, [1940] 1 K.B. 44.
     8        I will not read from it, save to make this observation
     9        about it, that on pages 452 and 453 Slesser L.J. explains
    10        why it is that an apparently ambiguous or neutral headline,
    11        faxed to the place in which it was found, which was a
    12        popular newspaper in that case, may tend to have a
    13        defamatory rather than an innocent meaning, simply for the
    14        reason that people do not put headlines like that on
    15        articles if the reader is not meant to take some
    16        significant message from the presence of the headline.  May
    17        I say a word about -----
    18
    19   MR. MORRIS:  Do you know where that appears in that judgment?
    20
    21   MR. RAMPTON:  I will read it then.
    22
    23   MR. JUSTICE BELL: No.
    24
    25   MR. RAMPTON:  452.
    26
    27   MR. JUSTICE BELL: In divider 6.
    28
    29   MR. RAMPTON:  I will read it, my Lord.  It is quicker in the
    30        end.  I would like to start, if I may, with a sentence
    31        about a quarter of the way down the page:  "In the
    32        dictionary sense".
    33
    34   MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes
    35
    36   MR. RAMPTON: "In the dictionary sense the word'false' may
    37             mean deceitful, untrue, dishonest, or it may
    38             have the meaning, and I think the more ordinary
    39             meaning, of mistaken or inaccurate or untrue
    40             without any moral obliquity.  But I do not think
    41             this is the type of case to which Lords Halsbury
    42             referred to Nevill v. Fine Art Insurance Co.,
    43             where one has to seek for the evil meaning and
    44             discard the innocent meaning.  I think the
    45             ordinary reader would assume tht the word
    46             'false' in this context, and stated with this
    47             imprint, meant fraudulent.  I think one may take
    48             into consideration the fact, as was said in
    49             Capital and Counties Bank v. Henty by Lord
    50             Selborne, approving of what Wilde C.J. had said 
    51             in Sturt v. Blagg, 'the manner and the occasion 
    52             of the publication'.  This article is published 
    53             in a popular newspaper.  If the words 'false
    54             profit' in a popular newspaper mean that which
    55             is merely untrue in the technical sense that a
    56             sum has been attributed to profit which, being
    57             the proceeds of sale of freehold land,
    58             technically should not have been so called, I do
    59             not think tht would have found expression in
    60             large italicized block type as something worthy

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