Day 186 - 10 Nov 95 - Page 10


     
     1
     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.
    14
    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.
    23
    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.
    31
    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".
    35
    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.
    45
    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. 
    53
    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

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