As a media legal scandal, it didn’t amount to much: no superinjunctions, celebrities or retired police horses. But my one (so far - touch wood) experience of being sued for defamation as a journalist illustrates an important shortcoming of the government’s current proposals for libel reform.

My ‘defamatory’ story was both true and in the public interest, yet became the subject of an action that blocked coverage over a significant few months. Briefly, as a freelance reporter, I received word that a large and well-known business had put up for sale a small division that traded with the public sector. The news was not unexpected - the division was way outside the organisation’s core business - and I was able to confirm it in a friendly telephone conversation with the overall chief executive, who assured me ‘your information is good’.

I wrote a few paragraphs for a niche weekly magazine (not the Gazette), and went off to Asia on another assignment. What I - and, I suspect, the chief executive - did not know was that the business division was on the point of winning a valuable public sector procurement. When the story appeared in print, my editor was hit first with a ‘without prejudice’ letter denying the sale plan, and then with a writ (this was in the early 1990s) alleging that my report implied duplicitous behaviour. With no way of contacting me, and on the advice of the publisher’s lawyer, the editor published the denial in full.

In due course, the public procurement went through, and the division was subsequently sold off. However the writ hung over my editor and me for many months until the publisher was able to have it struck out. In the meantime, we were advised not to touch the story with a barge pole.

In my opinion - here I need to be careful, because the business later became embroiled in several layers of legal controversy, one of which is still active - accurate reporting of the affair might have helped save the public purse a large sum of money. However, we were very effectively chilled from doing so.

The Ministry of Justice last week published its latest thinking on libel reform, in the form of its response to the Joint Scrutiny Report on the draft defamation bill. The Libel Reform Campaign welcomes the general drift, but says the government is falling short in three important areas. It says:

- ‘The current libel laws chill speech on matters of public interest and on expressions of opinion on matters in the public realm. We need a new effective statutory public interest defence. - ‘Libel laws are used by corporations and associations to squash any criticism and manage their brand. The laws need rebalancing to protect the ordinary individual or responsible publisher, by restricting the ability of such "non-natural persons" to sue for libel or threaten to do so.- ‘The law allows trivial and vexatious claims. There should be easier ‘strike out’ of trivial or inappropriate claims at an early stage.’

I agree.

Michael Cross is Gazette news editor

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