Day 177 - 26 Oct 95 - Page 26
1 faith in juries, but that is really beside the point.
2
3 My Lord, that is right; and, plainly -- I mean, I am
4 getting ahead of myself, but it does not matter at all
5 because it will hasten things along -- plainly, there are
6 articles, as there are books, serious articles in the
7 papers, what are pleased to call themselves heavyweight
8 Sundays newspapers, for example, or weekly magazines of a
9 serious nature, where people will read what is said at
10 least twice. That is often because the message -- and,
11 after all, one is always looking for the message when one
12 is hunting for the correct defamatory meaning -- sometimes
13 the hunt is long and hard, and it will often be the case
14 with, for example, an inside article in the Sunday Times,
15 one has to think quite hard about what one is actually
16 being told; and so one will, if one is interested -- often
17 one is not, but if one is -- read them twice. That is
18 undoubtedly right.
19
20 I do, however, take leave to differ from your Lordship in
21 supposing that the ordinary reasonable reader who is a
22 notional person -- and one must not canvass a range of
23 different types of reader; that is not permitted, as
24 Diplock L.J. made clear in Slim v. Daily Telegraph and as
25 was endorsed by the House of Lords in Charleston v. News
26 Group Newspapers -- one has to envisage a single prototype
27 or exemplar who arrives at a single meaning. One is not
28 permitted -- though it would be common sense to do so
29 perhaps, although impractical -- to canvass in one's mind a
30 range of different readers who might give the leaflet
31 different meanings according, perhaps, to their
32 temperament, according to how often they have bothered to
33 read it.
34
35 Focusing, if I may, on what we would suggest is the
36 prototypical or exemplary reader, the ordinary reasonable
37 man in the street -- which is what one must aim for -- can
38 I suggest something like this, that what one should
39 envisage is a person who is -- and this may be the most
40 common example as a matter of actual fact in this case, and
41 we will see in due course -- envisage an ordinary person of
42 average intelligence and of average age (not a child and
43 not an old person) with an average experience of the world
44 (not a specialist in nutrition, not somebody who has lived
45 in a monastery all his or her life), who is given a copy of
46 this leaflet in the street and, having read through it --
47 for we must assume that he reads it, or the law tells us we
48 have to assume -- but without overdue care and, certainly,
49 without any degree of critical analysis, having perhaps
50 thrown it away or taken it with him on to the tube, then
51 takes home with him an impression -- and an impression is
52 what it must be -- of what it has told him about McDonald's
53 generally and, for today's purposes, about the effects of
54 eating McDonald's food in particular.
55
56 My Lord, put it like this: if that is the right sort of
57 picture of the ordinary reasonable reader of this leaflet,
58 the consequence might be -- and we would say would be --
59 that when he gets home, and perhaps his wife sees him
60 carrying the leaflet still and he tells her about it, she
