THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON NEWSPAPER LIBEL.
THE Select Committee on the Law of Libel appointed last year, and renewed with certain modifications this Session, has recommended two distinct and very wide changes in the existing law, so far as it affects Newspapers. One of them we can partially support, but the other, in our judgment, confers on journalists a most dangerous and unjust privilege,—an exemption from responsibility which must in the long-run seriously lower journalism. We are quite aware that one of the most harassing difficulties of newspaper managers, especially in the provinces, is to keep libels out of the reports of public meetings. They constantly find themselves liable to actions for statements which they did not make, for which known men, also liable to action, are solely responsible, and which they have published with no more malice than would be felt by a speak- ing-trumpet or a phonograph. They certainly ought not to be punished criminally for such reports, and their character of reporters in the service of the public ought to be considered in estimating damages ; but to exempt them from responsi- bility altogether, as the Select Committee proposes to do, is to place them above the law. The difference between slander and libel is a real as well as a legal one, having its justifica- tion in well-understood mental peculiarities. Men believe state- ments in print. In publishing the reckless or the malicious stories of some unscrupulous orator, the newspaper managers have turned slanders into libels, that is, have given them not only circulation, but permanence and weight, and they ought to be responsible, if not for the speaker's statements, at least for the additional force with which they have invested them. The audience, say, in some taproom meeting called to discuss a local act of oppression, see the speakers ; they know who they are, they understand the persons attacked, they perceive the evidences of excitement or of drink, and they mentally discount half the statements made. The readers have none of those advan- tages ; they have a predisposition to believe rather than distrust any statement in print, and they credit slanders which in many cases may be at once ruinous and unfounded. We can see no reason whatever, either of justice or expediency, for exempting Editors who thus give importance to malig- nant gossip from their obligation to use moderate care, and cut such statements out in proof, as they are now compelled to do. They have plenty of time, and if they have not, it is better that " news" should be a little delayed than that all conspicuous persons—including, as every reader of the smaller provincial papers well knows, the whole body of the Clergy—should live under a perpetual liability to be libelled, practically with no redress. The village orator who, in the heat of a Burial controversy, de- clares that he knows the Rector does not account for the offertory, and that the verger once saw him put the contents of the plate into his pocket—a statement actually made about one of the most honest and foolish fanatics in England, a man, too, of unusual wealth—is practically unpunishable ; but he is not believed, and his venomous nonsense is speedily forgotten. But a statement of that kind recorded in print as uttered in a meeting by a speaker who, for anything the readers know, may be a churchwarden, is a frightful blow to the victim; and to exempt the journalist who stamps the lie with a sort of legal impress, besides giving it circulation outside the parish, is to relieve him of a responsibility by which every citizen ought to be restrained. Indeed, we do not see why he should not, on the same principle, be relieved altogether of responsibility for all libels not written by himself. If the Eatanswill Gazette may report the assertion of John Smith, excited local politician, that Mr. Gladstone once murdered and ate a keeper at Hawar- den, and be exempt from responsibility, why should it not be exempt when John Smith says the same thing in a letter under his own signature ? What is there in the position of a self-elected orator, who is probably hissed on the spot, that the journalist, when reporting his foolish malignity, should be exempted from the law, any more than when he publishes some equally foolish and malignant but written accusation ? In either case, John Smith is equally visible, and the editor may equally plead that the statement is published in the public interest. The exemption proposed is far too wide, and would rapidly introduce among us the American system, under which any public man may be accused in public meeting of anything with impunity—General Garfield, for example, a man of strict character, has just been accused in this way of theft—and men of refinement or sensitiveness are driven out of public life alto- gether. If, indeed, reports of foreign meetings were included, the law might have unexpectedly formidable effects. We remember a public speech made many years ago by the Red Deputy Baudin, about the Princes of Europe, which if re- published in England—an impossibility under the law—would have sold a million copies of the irresponsible journal, and might have affected the whole future history of two countries. The rider added by the Committee to their recommendation— that a newspaper publishing any derogatory statement shall publish a contradiction from the victim—is, as a protection in serious cases, almost useless. The denial is not read by half the persons who saw the attack, and by half those who do read it, it is disbelieved.
We would leave the newspapers under their present respon- sibility for reports, and confine reform to the second suggestion of the Select Committee. There can be no doubt that libel is
often a criminal offence, the libeller intending to torture or to hurt, and should be punishable as such. But there can be no
doubt, either, that the criminal law of libel as it stands is open to abuse, and is abused. It is monstrous that an inno- cent man should be put in prison, as happened the other day, because while he was abroad his agent had pub- lished, without his consent, or indeed against his remon- strance, an unjustifiable libel. It is still more monstrous that a shareholder in a newspaper should be criminally liable because an editor, against whose appointment he voted, has carelessly admitted a letter containing a legal libel. And it is most monstrous of all, as we believe to be now the case, that a part proprietor, precluded from interference by the very terms of the partnership deed, should be open to arrest for the act of agents he did not appoint and cannot remove. The Juries in such extreme cases may be trusted, but a prose- cution is in itself a punishment, involving great annoyance, and a heavy fine. And it is not expedient, in the general interest of the country, which benefits when scrupulous or even timid men are attracted into journalism, that a libel of the lighter kind, a libel only constructively malicious, should be punished as a serious offence. The actual offender, the person legally in charge of the paper, or still better, the writer alone, should be criminally responsible—damages being quite sufficient punishment to the absent proprietor—while the criminal action should be confined to the graver descriptions of
libel. The Select Committee hope to secure these improvements by requiring the prosecutor as a preliminary to obtain the flat of the Attorney-General, and if that officer were not usually so vehement a partisan, that might be a sufficient precaution, at least to prevent frivolous applications. But we confess we have an instinctive doubt of his perfect impartiality. News- papers are always objects of very keen and unreasonable likes and dislikes, and occasionally of most vehement and almost maniacal hatreds. An Attorney-General, acting in a quasi- judicial capacity, may, we suppose, be as much trusted as an average Judge; but there is a deal of human nature even in Judges, and a libel, say, in the Nation or the Irish People, on some landlord like the late Lord Leitrim, might strike a Tory and a Liberal Attorney-General very differently indeed. The one might think it an incentive to murder, and the other a just reproof for capricious tyranny. No doubt, a certain flexibility is wanted in the system, which would be secured by interposing a keen, not to say callous, man of the world between a prosecutor and his prey ; but we would rather, if possible, make the law automatic, until at least, as in Scotland, a Crown officer is made the legal prosecutor. If criminal liability were restricted to the writer of grave libels,—that is, libels imputing criminality or dishonour, or to the writer and the responsible editor on the spot, and all other libels were punished by damages, the law would be automatic, and would, we believe, be sufficiently effective. A much lighter one effectually restrains libel in Scotland. At present, it is so harsh and so unjust, that but that it is leniently worked, and that juries are greatly influenced by the habitual tone of an accused journal, men of property would hesitate to embark in such undertakings. It is absolutely necessary that journalists should remain under the law, and not be declared irresponsible because they have " only " changed malignant slander into dangerous libel ; but it is not necessary that they should all be treated as presumptive criminals, sure to use their powers badly unless menaced with imprisonment for every, often acci- dental, default.
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