Grigori Loutchansky sued The Times over an article which
appeared in its print and on-line editions in 1999, accusing him of
involvement in money laundering and the smuggling of nuclear
weapons.
The Times successfully argued that its print edition was
protected by a defence of “qualified privilege,” that it was the
duty of a free press to give the public information on matters of
public interest, even if the matters later turned out to be false.
The court agreed. It noted that this defence gives journalists and
their editors a degree of protection against libel actions when
they report on matters of public interest, provided they act
responsibly.
However, the newspaper also argued that qualified privilege
protected its on-line news archive. It said that it maintained on
its web site a publicly available archive of past issues “as a
service to the public at large.” The court disagreed.
The court reasoned that archive material is “stale news” and its
publication could not rank in importance with the dissemination of
contemporary material. According to The Times, the court said that
“where it was known that archive material was or might be
defamatory, the attachment of an appropriate notice warning against
treating it as the truth would normally remove the sting from the
material.” The failure to attach any qualifications to the on-line
articles over the period of a year “could not possibly be described
as responsible journalism.”
Coincidentally, the Court of Appeals gave its decision on the
same day that the New York Supreme Court ruled in an unrelated case
of internet libel which was brought by the Bank of Mexico against a
Mexican publisher and writer over on-line material that accused the
Bank’s president of involvement in drug trafficking. The Bank’s
case was dismissed, the court finding that the publisher was
protected by the media’s broad principles of freedom of speech.
