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

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