Burleigh v Telegraph Media Group Ltd

Whether an apology is defamatory of the author of an earlier article depends on the words used, their context and their overall effect. A reader cannot reasonably infer culpability merely because a publisher accepts that an article contained false statements and pays damages. Any implication of want of skill or care must arise from the publication itself, rather than speculation about how the errors occurred. Published apologies are not subject to a special, publisher-friendly meaning rule. The ordinary principles governing meaning and defamatory tendency apply.

The claimant, an author and journalist, sued in libel over an apology published by the defendant newspaper concerning an article she had written about Melania Trump. The apology accepted that the article contained several false statements, apologised to Mrs Trump and her family, and referred to substantial damages and costs.

On preliminary issues directed by Master Davison, the court had to determine the natural and ordinary meaning conveyed to readers who knew that the claimant wrote the original article, and whether that meaning was defamatory at common law. The issues were decided on written submissions without reading the original article.

1. Meaning and defamatory tendency. Applying the principles in Koutsogiannis v Random House Group Ltd [2020] 4 WLR, Stocker v Stocker [2020] AC 593 and Allen v Times Newspapers Ltd [2019] EWHC 1235 (QB), the court assessed the apology as a whole and avoided over-analysis. The ordinary reader would not infer from the apology how the false statements came to be included.
2. The possible explanations ranged from innocent mistake to deliberate fabrication. Selecting an explanation that attributed culpability to the claimant would require speculation and would be unreasonable. There was no implication, or indirect suggestion, that the claimant was at fault.
3. The corrections were chiefly trivial factual matters or matters on which opinions might differ. They did not suggest a fundamental failure in the original article or an attack on its central thrust. The reference to substantial damages did not alter the overall meaning, since publishers settle claims for various reasons.
4. The natural and ordinary meaning was that the claimant had published an article containing several incorrect statements about Mrs Trump, which the defendant accepted should not have been published and for which it agreed to publish a correction and apology and pay substantial damages.
5. That meaning did not impute conduct tending to lower the claimant in the estimation of right-thinking people, nor did it meet the common-law seriousness threshold. The apology was therefore not defamatory. The court rejected a policy-based submission that apologies should receive special protection, explaining that their meaning must be determined by the established principles applicable to any publication. The defendant was provisionally entitled to judgment.