Cases

Curistan v Times Newspapers Ltd (CA)

Comment

The Court has ruled that when assessing a hybrid article, where part only is protected by qualified privilege, the repetition rule cannot be applied to assess the meaning of the non-privileged parts. The privileged parts of the article remain relevant to context. The ruling means that a hybrid article could have a different meaning depending on whether the privilege defence was upheld or not. Laws LJ recognised [85] that the decision meant that hybrid cases would represent exceptions to both the repetition and single-meaning rules, but that this was necessary because otherwise the report privilege would be nullified. In practice, the judgment means that in hybrid cases, any privilege defence would have to be determined before meaning can be ascertained. How that will be done in the context of an action to be tried by jury will have to be worked out by first instance judges.

Areas of work

Defamation
Media Law

Also