Three articles which appeared in one edition of a newspaper had to be read together and treated as ‘constituting a whole’ for the purposes of determining meaning, where the first ended with a cross-reference to the second, and the second ended with a cross-reference to the third.
Lord MacFadyen
[1999] ScotCS 52, 2000 SLT 256
Bailii
Scotland
Citing:
Cited – The Capital and Counties Bank Limited v George Henty and Sons HL 1882
The defendant wrote to their customers saying ‘Henty and Sons hereby give notice that they will not receive in payment cheques drawn on any of the branches of the Capital and Counties Bank.’ The contents of the circular became known and there was a . .
Cited – Waddell v Roxburgh 1894
The court discussed the meaning of slander: ‘It may be that to confine the use of the word slander to cases where the language complained of is obviously and on the face of it defamatory and injurious would be convenient, but I should rather have . .
Cited – Sim v Stretch HL 1936
Test For Defamatory Meaning
The plaintiff complained that the defendant had written in a telegram to accuse him of enticing away a servant. The House considered the process of deciding whether words were defamatory.
Held: The telegram was incapable of bearing a . .
Cited – Russell v Stubbs Limited HL 3-Apr-1913
The plaintiff said that the defendants, publishers of a trade magazine providing inter alia credit references, had slandered it. The defendants appealed against an order requiring it to provide details of others to whom the slander had been . .
Cited – Langlands v John Leng and Company Limited HL 1916
Complaint was made as to observations made by an architect and said to be defamatory.
Held: These had referred to a criticism of the system under which the architect was employed and not to the architect individually.
Viscount Haldane . .
Cited – Gollan v Thompson Wyles Company 1930
Lord President Clyde discussed the order of consideration of the elements of defamation: ‘The question of the admissibility of an innuendo necessarily arises in Scotland at the relevancy stage. If – as here – the statement complained of is not . .
Cited – Lewis v Daily Telegraph Ltd HL 1964
Ascertaining Meaning of Words for Defamation
The Daily Telegraph had published an article headed ‘Inquiry on Firm by City Police’ and the Daily Mail had published an article headed ‘Fraud Squad Probe Firm’. The plaintiffs claimed that those articles carried the meaning that they were guilty of . .
Cited – Charleston and Another v News Group Newspapers Ltd and Another HL 31-Mar-1995
The plaintiffs were actors playing Harold and Madge Bishop in the Australian soap series ‘Neighbours’. They sued on a tabloid newspaper article which showed their faces superimposed on the near-naked bodies of models apparently engaged in sexual . .
Cited – Muirhead v George Outram and Company Limited 1983
. .
Cited by:
Cited – Dee v Telegraph Media Group Ltd QBD 28-Apr-2010
The newspaper sought summary judgment in its defence of the defamation claim. The article labelled the claimant as the world’s worst professional tennis player. The paper said he had no prospect of succeeding once the second article in the same . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Defamation
Updated: 05 January 2022; Ref: scu.169670
