Reversible Straitjacket

Britain's stern laws of libel and contempt, which keep much of Britain's news out of print, made news on their own account last week.

P: For their coverage of Dr. John Bodkin Adams' trial on a charge of murder, five London newspapers--the Daily Mail, News Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard and Daily Mirror--had libel writs from Dr. Adams' lawyers.

P: In a separate action resulting from the Adams case. Britain's biggest newsstand distributor, W. H. Smith & Son. announced that henceforth it will 1) screen all foreign newspapers and magazines for material that seems to violate the libel and contempt laws, and 2) handle no publications that do not have a British representative who can be held responsible in the event of court judgments. In addition, Smith's asked foreign publishers to indemnify them against fines and other expenses levied on them as a result of material in publications distributed by them.

Away As At Home. Smith's ultimatum was prompted by a contempt case in which it was fined $140 for distributing an issue of Newsweek containing a story that was held prejudicial to Dr. Adams' case. While punishing the distributor, the court did not punish Newsweek, ruled that Newsweek's London bureau chief, Eldon W. Griffiths, was not responsible.' since he testified that he had cabled nothing on the Adams trial and that the offending account had been written in New York from newspaper clippings.

Smith's decree was flatly rejected by the New York Times, which has only token circulation in Britain. Another U.S. newspaper distributed in Britain was expected to agree not to run any stories on British criminal cases without first clearing the copy with Smith's. Other U.S. publications were more likely to accept in Britain, as they do at home, responsibility for the accuracy and legality of what they print and, in effect, provide a person to be sued in British courts. This, plus a promise to indemnify distributors against damages, could leave the distributors free to distribute foreign publications without the "screening" threatened by Smith's. It was not the ideal way to avoid what many Britons were quick to call "censorship." 'There is need, said the New Statesman and Nation, for "a thorough overhaul of the law governing contempt of court, with its arbitrary powers . . . and its medieval refusal of all right of appeal." But, as the Manchester Guardian pointed out, "there is no clear way out of the thicket"'of libel and contempt strictures. Britain's libel laws are an uncodified mass of legal decisions from which lawyers have never culled a satisfactory definition of defamation. They make Britain's press the most suit-harried in the world.

In Britain, the courts still tend to view defamatory or contemptuous statements by newspapers more gravely than their American counterparts. British newspapers seldom win a libel suit; U.S. papers win at least as many as they lose. In the U.S., keyhole-peeping columnists are rarely sued for running exaggerated or even fabricated accounts of celebrities' loves and lapses. But privacy-proud Englishmen do not treat unfavorable stories as unworthy of notice--not to the extent of refraining from a promising libel suit.

Beaverbrook Revisited. A U.S. publisher has little to fear in court if he can prove that a story is true and a matter of legitimate public interest. British courts also accept truth as a defense, but where truth cannot be proved, they are quick to impute malice, which greatly increases the damages. The press in Britain is thus denied anything approaching the freedom of criticism and comment that is taken for granted in the U.S. In reviewing a book, an art show, a concert, a play, the British critic--even the sportswriter--is bound not only to present the facts truthfully but also to refrain from comment that could be construed under the standard, 79-year-old ruling as "personal censure or . . . reckless or unfair attacks merely for the love of exercising his power of denunciation." In the past five months Novelist Evelyn (Brideshead Revisited) Waugh has collected $14,000 from Lord Beaver-brook's Daily Express in two suits over book reviewers' comments on his works.

Vampire Victim. British laws governing contempt of court are equally restrictive on the press. Result: the world's most lackluster crime reporting. In Britain, when a suspect is arrested in connection with a crime, his identity--vital to any U.S. story of an arrest--is seldom revealed until formal charges have been filed. Even then, a British newspaper risks a contempt citation if it so much as alludes to developments that are the meat and potatoes of a crime reporting in the U.S., e.g., a confession, details of the defendant's life, even his previous convictions.

An editor who prints any detail of a case that does not appear in the trial transcript (and is thus privileged) runs the risk of a court judgment. So gravely do British courts view any story that might prejudice a fair trial that a Daily Mirror editor in 1949 was sentenced to three months in jail for running a story that said a so-called Vampire Killer was "safely behind bars, powerless to lure his victims to a hideous death." Reason: the suspect was charged with only one murder.

Sea Lawyer. Faced with the dual threat of libel and contempt, all British editors must resort at times to euphemisms and circumlocutions that would do credit to a sea lawyer. To be on the safe side, many papers print only the sketchiest reports of crime. But at the other extreme, the dirt-hungry sensationalist papers thrive on scandal dredged legally from police court records and, on stories like the Adams case, evade the law by patching together a rat's nest of innuendo, non sequitur and irrelevancy. Thus, in practice, the law does not protect the public from the excesses of sensational newspapers. The law is a reversible strait-jacket that makes staid papers staider and the yellow press yellower.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.