Page 75 - Law and the Media

Law and the Media
penalties for the maker of a serious libel are harsher for criminal libel than those imposed in
the civil courts. An embittered individual may get far more satisfaction from the thought of
sending a reporter, broadcaster or editor to jail than from pursuing an action for damages.

2.4.1 What is criminal libel?

A criminal libel must be in permanent form. The words must tend to vilify a person and to
bring them into hatred, contempt and ridicule.

Probably because of its public order origins, it was thought at one time that an essential
ingredient of criminal libel was a tendency to provoke a breach of the peace. However, more
recent cases have shown that for a libel to amount to a criminal offence it must simply be a
‘serious’ rather than trivial libel. Any remaining doubt about a breach of the peace element
in criminal libel was resolved in the case of Gleaves v Deakin (1980):

A criminal libel must be a serious libel. If the libel is of such a character as to be
likely to disturb the peace of the community or to provoke a breach of the peace,
then it is not to be regarded as trivial. But to hold . . . that the existence of such a
tendency tends to show that the libel is a serious one, is a very different thing from
saying that proof of its existence is necessary to establish guilt of the offence.

It was also suggested that a criminal libel might be identified by a comparison between what
is deemed to be serious and what would be regarded as trivial:

It is, however, not every libel that warrants a criminal prosecution. To warrant
prosecution the libel must be sufficiently serious to require the intervention of the
Crown in the public interest . . . The libel must be more than of a trivial charter:
it must be such as to provoke anger or cause resentment.

Criminal libel differs from civil libel in a number of respects. The accuracy or truth of a
statement in criminal libel will not necessarily protect its maker from punishment. ‘The
greater the truth the greater the libel’ is a phrase that is rooted in this branch of the law. It
has always been recognized that the truth is often more likely to arouse fury than obvious
falsehood. Unlike civil libel, those accused of criminal libel must establish that the words
were true and that they were published for the public benefit.

2.4.2 Defending criminal libel actions

There are two clearly recognized defences to criminal libel:

1. Under Section 6 of the Libel Act 1843 the defendant will have a good defence if he
establishes that the words complained of were true and were published ‘for the public
benefit’
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