THE IMPUNITY OF EDITORS.
IF Mr. Baines and his friends of the provincial journals do not take care, they will succeed in destroying the freedom of the Press. The way to do that is to make much of the rights of journalists, while suppressing all argument on their duties, to place them as far as possible above all laws except those which forbid robbery and murder, to sacrifice everybody's liberty of opinion in order to secure theirs, and to compel the public at last to inquire whether a privileged aristocracy of the pen may not be as great a nuisance as a privileged aristocracy of the sword. When Bills are brought into Parliament expressly and avowedly designed to enable journalists to commit grave offences with impunity, it is time for those who are genuinely proud of their profession to resist, and declare that they will not accept so invidious an isolation from the remainder of mankind. The Bill which Mr. Baines described on Wednesday. and which the House of Commons, under the pressure of county papers, will probably pass, may be shortly described as a Bill for enabling a journalist to neglect his duty whenever such neglect will seriously injure any fellow-citizen. The first clause runs as follows :—" In any action or prosecution for an alleged libel in any public newspaper, proof that the alleged libel was a true and fair report of the proceedings at a meeting lawfully assembled for a lawful purpose, open to reporters for the public newspapers, and at which a reporter was present for the purpose of reporting the proceedings of such meeting for a public newspaper, and that the report was published in such newspaper by the defendant bond fide without actual malice and in the ordinary course of business, shall amount to a defence, and such proof may in all cases be given by the defendant under the plea of not guilty 'by statute.' " In other words, any man owning or conducting any journal may do another person irremediable injury without being in any way responsible to him or to the law. He may, in fact, by virtue of statutory privilege, repeat to, say, sixty thousand persons a libel he has heard with absolute impunity. Talk of the privileges of the Peerage, of Members' exemption from the Eighth Commandment, of the separate jurisdiction secured on the Continent to soldiers, what are they all put together to a privilege like this ? John Smith says that Thomas Brown is a thief, and if the journalist repeats that statement to a friend he is liable to an action for slander, and if he puts it in a letter to a more serious process ; but if he repeats it to sixty thousand people, then he is not so liable. We will just put a case of a kind which occurs every day, and which will perhaps bring the meaning of this privilege home to some worthy members, who else would vote for this Bill just because they think " the newspapers will like it." There is a row in a country town about some rate, which the upper class want to keep up and the householders to keep down. John Robinson, working tailor and patriot, denounces the said upper class, and particularly the local banker, observing that he need not be so arrogant, for everybody knows that his bank is rotten, and would have suspended payment last Saturday if Overends had not helped them. The writer heard that very statement made about one of the most solvent bankers in England during a stormy meeting about a parish churchrate. Everybody laughed, but suppose that statement sent abroad in print to the whole county, what is the banker to do after this Act is passed ? He is to write to the editor to say, " I am perfectly solvent," that is to say, he is invested with the power of undergoing an additional penalty as compensation for having been slandered ! Oh !' replies Mr. Baines, he can prosecute John Robinson, for the bill makes John a libeller.' That is to say, he can ask damages from a poor devil who cannot even pay costs, and who made his preposterous statement in the heat of declamation and controversy, and who may believe it besides, and may not ask any redress from the editor, whose act gives the libel all its importance, who deliberately stereotypes to all time a statement which else would have been forgotten as soon as made, and who knows that it may cause
grievous personal and public injury. Nor is that all. The journalist is actually invested by this Act with a new kind of power. He may actually repeat the libel in his leader as a quotation, and so lend it the whole weight of his own character and that of his journal, and yet be within the law. Suppose Finlen on Good Friday next to state, as a fact within his personal knowledge, that the Prince of Wales once robbed a church of its plate, who would care ? But suppose the Spectator next day to print that statement by itself in one of our little leaders thus,—" Mr. Finlen said," &c., would not half our readers believe that we knew the apparent absurdity to be true, but did not want to state it on our own authority ? And what redress under this Bill would the Prince have for that piece of wicked malice ? Absolutely none, except legal permission to write and say he didn't rob a church, which letter half the journals competing for public favour would regard as a glorious advertisement. He might prosecuteFinlen, but suppose Finlen were M. Jacques, half mad but eloqent Red, pouring out at Grenoble in legalized public meeting, with commissary and what not, every conceivable lie he could think of about every royal personage in Europe ? There would be absolutely no redress at all ; and that particular case has actually occurred within the last six weeks, though we have not given the true names. We have specially put these two cases, attacks on property and on the Royal Family, because members will thoroughly understand them ; but the heaviest penalty of all will fall on county members. Every perverse falsehood which the momentary malignity of half-tipsy orators may pour out in village meetings may. under this Bill, be repeated with impunity in the county press, that is, to thousands of readers who do not know, as the audience do, either the character of the speaker or of his victim. " As for the Squire," says the local orator, " he ain't no count. Why he beats his wife every morning." Audience, knowing the Squire to be unmarried, is highly tickled; but the readers of the county paper who do not know it, are not tickled at all, and for years there is a vague impression in distant places that the Squire is known in his own parish to be a brute. Such a thing is quite impossible ? Just read "Frewen v. Pattison,' not yet two months old.
We contend that the journalist who repeats a libel, unless uttered in Parliament, is bound to accept its consequences, and that the excuse of hurry or inadvertence is no more an excuse for him than it is for a cabman who drives over an old woman because he wants to catch a train. He must use care and diligence like everybody else, and the way to make him do it is to punish him for the consequences of neglect. At present, such instances are wonderfully rare, just because the law creates in reporters and journalists an instinctive carefulness which protects them and the public, but which would, if the law were relaxed, be exchanged for indolence and apathy, and the natural disposition which no journalists ever can quite subdue, to let the proprietor force the sale of his paper by any means for which the journalist himself is not personally responsible. The strictness and swiftness of our law of libel is not, we quite admit, needed to keep down the maliciousness of English journalists, for as a
rule, though there are exceptions, they succeed best, and know that they succeed best, when they adhere in all respects to the rules which govern Parliamentary debate ; but they are required to prevent their giving way to indolence, to carelessness, and to their greatest intellectual foible, an inability to see how much mischief a " mere story " may do to its victim and to society. There are evils which press on journalists, their liability to arrest for mentioning a case while it is in progress being perhaps the greatest ; but the Government is about to remove most of them, and the House of Commons should be content to stop short with Mr. Gladstone. If it is not, we shall, in ten years, have the Press hated as it is in America and France ; and, England being practical, subjected to restrictions twenty times as rigorous as those under which journalists have risen to the influence which makes even the House of Commons afraid to reject this Bill.
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