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
