What is ‘reportage’?

Galloway MP (George) v Telegraph Group Ltd [2004] EWHC 2786 (QB)

Amber Melville-Brown considered this judgment in an article in the Law Society’s Gazette of 10 February. The Daily Telegraph had published a series of articles setting out in full various documents which had been found by one of its journalists in the badly damaged offices of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry after the fall of Baghdad. The judge found that the articles meant that the claimant had been in the pay of Saddam Hussein, had diverted monies from the oil-for-food programme, and had used a charity appeal as a front for personal enrichment, and what he had done was tantamount to treason. The defence was that the reports amounted to no more than ‘reportage’, which was a convenient word to describe the neutral reporting of attributed allegations rather than their adoption by a newspaper. Reportage entitles a publisher to depart from the repetition rule and to report alleged facts said by others or within documents without having to prove them, provided that the publisher does not go beyond the allegations, embellish them, add allegations of his own or draw inferences from them, or both. The judge applied the 10-point test prescribed in Reynolds v Times Newspapers Ltd [1999] ICHRL 148, together with the common law test of ‘whether in all the circumstances the duty-interest test of the right to know test’ had been satisfied so that qualified privilege attached. Was the Daily Telegraph under a social or moral duty to communicate what it chose to publish about and concerning the Iraquí documents? The reporting was not neutral, and there was no duty to publish the information in the way that the newspaper had done, and, accordingly, the Daily Telegraph had not met the requisite standard of responsible journalism and the Reynolds privilege defence had not been made out. Mr Galloway was awarded £150,000 damages. The author concluded that the decision was a lesson to those publishing in the UK that they must still remind themselves daily of the principles of responsible journalism against which they will be measured in the UK courts.