The Court of Appeal decision handed down earlier this week in Flood v Times Newspapers Ltd has landed a telling blow on attempts to erode the law's insistence on compliance with the highest ethical standards of journalism.

In 2006, the Times published an article detailing allegations that a police officer had accepted bribes in exchange for sensitive information.  The officer sued and the Times ran a qualified privilege defence. This allows the publication of matters of public interest (even though they are wrong) provided that the journalist has followed good practice in trying to check out the allegations. In essence, the judge at first instance had accepted the Times' argument that the public interest in knowing that very serious allegations had been made against a police officer was so important that it trumped the journalist's obligation to verify the facts, even though the journalist had added detail that would tend to make the reader believe they were true. This was a very dangerous development for anyone concerned about their reputation. Luckily the Court of Appeal disagreed.

On appeal, the Master of the Rolls stated,

"it would be tipping the scales too far in favour of the media to hold that not only the name of the claimant, but the details of the allegations against him, can normally be published as part of a story free of any right in the claimant to sue for defamation just because the general subject matter of the story is in the public interest"

It did not follow that because there was a public interest in publishing the fact of the investigation that there was also public interest in publishing the allegations particularly where, as in this case, the allegations were set out in detail, which suggested that they were well-founded.

This judgment establishes that even where a third party has made serious allegations, which of itself is a matter of public interest, a newspaper reporting the details of those allegations can only rely on a defence of qualified privilege if they have taken reasonable steps to verify the accuracy of those allegations. 

This article was written for Law-Now, CMS Cameron McKenna's free online information service. To register for Law-Now, please go to www.law-now.com/law-now/mondaq

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The original publication date for this article was 15/07/2010.