🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1970@thanatos.win-uk.net>,
Paul Burridge <osiris@thanatos.win-uk.net> wrote:
>In article <cKnA1AAJDDH3EwOD@kitzbuhel.demon.co.uk>, Andy (andy@kitzbuhel.demon.co.uk) writes:
>
>>Isn't it more correct to say that *during those 10 days* Demon were
>>publishing material which Dr Godfrey had asserted to them was libellous
>>- no court having ruled it to be so.
>
>It doesn't take a court of law to declare something like the item
>in question to be capable of being defamatory. Anyone with a
>room-temperature IQ could see it was. 

I don't think that can be so clear cut. News has trolling, which does
not seem to appear in other media, so it's quite possible for someone to
post an article with quite outrageous views just for the fun of seeing
who gets taken in by it, and when the author admits they were only
trolling, those taken in may feel that they have harmed their own
reputations by showing how gullible they are. In a medium with this
phenomenon it is certainly arguable that material is subject to a much
more sceptical appraisal, leading to material which is quite serious in
other media being innocuous here, and material which is totally
unacceptable in other media being fairly mild here.

In the case of the article in question, it could be argued that those
credulous enough to believe it was genuine would have realised their
mistake when it was pointed out that the author appeared to have
misspelled his own name (which would have been supplied by his
software, so it couldn't be human error).