defamation

Paul Wells on why Daniel Dale is within his rights to sue

Colby Cosh on the latest chapter in a Calgary drama

Colby Cosh sets up today’s action in B.C. Supreme Court

U.S. student newspaper’s funding deserved to be cut

‘Gossip Girl-type’ website is risking legal action for so-called campus exposure

British historian Orlando Figes admits to anonymously trashing competitors’ work online

Simon Singh MBE, the celebrated science writer and documentarian, has officially won his libel tilt with the British Chiropractic Association. In April 2008 Singh wrote a column for the Guardian about the persistence of pre-scientific ideas in the British chiropractic trade. What most people now think of as merely an expert form of massage began with the claim that spinal maladjustments were the source of virtually all disease in humans, and some chiropractors still believe they can cure a lot more than back and joint pain. Singh wrote:

Q: Is Jeffrey Dvorkin’s analysis of the new defamation-law scene the product of expired eggnog? His piece entitled “Libel law reform: Be careful what you wish for” warns that the recent Supreme Court decision is “no early Christmas present” for Canadian media companies, and since that is exactly how I characterized it, I feel entitled to object to his contrarian Hail Mary.

As the content of the Supreme Court’s “responsible communication” ruling propagates, I am seeing and hearing a lot of despairing wails of “Oh, TMZ will just love this!” Well, I’m sure the folks at TMZ love it when someone complains about them—usually, one guesses, in between visits to the site. In a mere matter of months TMZ has managed to replace the poor old Enquirer as the go-to synecdoche for the irresistible evils of celebrity-stalking.

Don’t expect much from your journalism elite today, citizens: we’ll be busy celebrating our early Christmas gift from the Supreme Court of Canada. It was widely anticipated that the SCC would follow other Commonwealth jurisdictions in creating a new “responsible journalism” defence to defamation. It’s one that encourages contextual analysis of defamatory words, rather than casuistic focus on individual terms; creates less of a “strict liability” environment for journalists; and allows for the repetition of defamatory statements if the mere fact that those statements were made is itself news and the statements were properly attributed and set in context.