Justin Baldoni v. The New York Times

A high-profile celebrity lawsuit was dismissed yesterday after Blake Lively withdrew her claims of emotional distress against Justin Baldoni, her co-star in the film It Ends with Us. Lively had filed a suit against Baldoni, who also directed the film, on 20th December last year, and the document was immediately leaked to the The New York Times, which published a lengthy article about the case on its website the following day.

The article, headlined “Alleged Effort To Strike Back At Star Actress”, appeared in the NYT’s print edition on 23rd December. It included extracts from text messages sent between publicists Jennifer Abel and Melissa Nathan, suggesting that they were attempting to smear Lively and protect Baldoni’s reputation. One message, sent by Nathan, said: “You know we can bury anyone”. (This was used as the article’s online headline.) The article included a disclaimer that “messages have been edited for length”, and Baldoni sued the newspaper on New Year’s Eve arguing that the messages had been “stripped of necessary context and deliberately spliced to mislead”.

Lively’s claims against Baldoni, which included extensive allegations of sexual harassment, were criticised on social media, in the same way that Amber Heard’s reputation was trashed online after her allegations against Johnny Depp. Baldoni’s defamation lawsuit against the NYT, seeking $250 million in damages, is unlikely to proceed to trial: on 4th March, judge Lewis Liman noted that the newspaper had demonstrated “substantial grounds for dismissal”, and that “its motion to dismiss is likely to succeed on the merits.”

“Publishers are not liable for honest mistakes...”

A jury has found that The New York Times did not defame Sarah Palin when it published an editorial on 14th June 2017. Palin had sued the newspaper for libel over a sentence in the editorial falsely implying that her campaign had encouraged the 2011 shooting of fellow politician Gabby Giffords: “Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”

The newspaper had swiftly apologised for the editorial — “We got an important fact wrong, incorrectly linking political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Giffords” — and inserted a clarification into the online version of the article the day after its original publication: “no connection to the shooting was ever established.” The initial libel case ended on 15th February 2022, when a jury concluded that the editorial was not defamatory.

Palin appealed against that verdict, and she was granted a retrial on 28th August last year. Yesterday, the week-long retrial ended with a different jury reaching the same conclusion, that the newspaper did not intentionally defame Palin. After yesterday’s verdict, New York Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said: “The decision reaffirms an important tenet of American law: publishers are not liable for honest mistakes.”

“Nixon Resigns”

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as US president. The second term of his presidency had been dominated by investigations into the Watergate scandal, and in his resignation speech on 8th August 1974 he conceded that he was vacating the office to avoid almost certain impeachment by both the House of Representatives and the Senate: “because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the nation would require.” (The speech was released on vinyl as Resignation of a President.)

Famously, at a press conference on 17th November 1973, Nixon had insisted: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” But after his so-called ‘White House plumbers’ broke into the Democratic National Committee’s Washington headquarters in the Watergate building, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered a criminal conspiracy that led all the way to the presidency. (Woodward and Bernstein’s work was one of the greatest examples of investigative journalism in newspaper history. Their main source, nicknamed ‘Deep Throat’, was deputy FBI director Mark Felt.)

It was the ‘smoking gun tape’ transcript, released following a Supreme Court ruling, that finally confirmed Nixon’s attempt to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into the Watergate burglary. On the tape, a recording of an Oval Office meeting on 23rd June 1972, Nixon says that the CIA “should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period.” The transcript was published on 5th August 1974; Nixon resigned three days later. In his inauguration speech, Nixon’s successor Gerald Ford drew a line under the Watergate controversy and declared: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”

In an interview with David Frost (broadcast on 19th May 1977), Nixon implied that a president has immunity from prosecution: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” At the time, this was seen as a gross misreading of the US constitution, though earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled that a president does indeed have legal immunity for any official act carried out while in office. This ruling was particularly controversial as it came at a time when former president Donald Trump had been convicted of covering up a hush money payment and was under investigation for other crimes.

“IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT”?

When Donald Trump was convicted of falsifying business records to conceal his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, the next day’s newspaper headlines were almost unanimous: “GUILTY”. The exception was the New York Post: of all the major US newspapers, the Post was the only one to criticise the verdict, and its front page headline on 31st May was “INJUSTICE”.

The Post’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, supported Trump’s presidency, albeit through gritted teeth: he was quoted calling Trump a “fucking idiot” in Michael Wolf’s Fire and Fury. Murdoch’s Fox News acted as a Trump mouthpiece, even knowingly broadcasting false conspiracy theories about ‘rigging’ the 2020 election. Tucker Carlson, one of Fox’s highest-profile presenters, dismissed Trump in private — as revealed in emails disclosed before the Dominion Voting Systems defamation trial — yet endorsed him on the air.

After the 2022 midterms, Murdoch seemed to distance himself from Trump. The Post ridiculed him as “TRUMPTY DUMPTY” on its 10th November 2022 front page. Six days later, it denied Trump what he craves most — publicity — by relegating his declaration that he was running for re-election to a single line at the bottom of the page: “FLORIDA MAN MAKES ANNOUNCEMENT”.

Yet Trump continues to dominate the Republican party, hence the Post’s recent olive branch “INJUSTICE” headline. Murdoch is motivated by profit and political influence: the ‘Trump bump’ (the increase in clicks and subscribers caused by Trump news coverage) is hard to resist, and there’s an increasing likelihood of Trump winning this year’s US election. (Trump’s CNN debate with Joe Biden on 28th March was disastrous for Biden.)

In the UK, The Sun — also owned by Murdoch — has backed the winning party in every election since 1979, giving it a long-standing reputation for influencing public opinion. But the reality is that Murdoch knows which way the wind is blowing, and The Sun switches its allegiances accordingly, reflecting the prevailing mood rather than manipulating it.

The Sun endorsed the Conservatives in the 1979, 1983, 1987, 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019 elections, and in each case the party had a significant lead in the opinion polls. After much effort by Tony Blair, he received The Sun’s endorsement in the run-up to the 1997 election — the 18th March 1997 headline was “THE SUN BACKS BLAIR” — but by that point Labour’s victory was already a foregone conclusion. Similarly, The Sun backed Blair and Labour in 2001 and 2005 as the party was ahead in the polls.

After the 1992 election, The Sun famously took credit for the Conservative victory with the headline “IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT” (11th April 1992). Exceptionally, the paper had endorsed the Conservatives despite Labour’s lead in the opinion polls, but the self-congratulatory headline was hardly justified. Labour’s lead was very slight, and pollsters are aware that Conservative voters are generally less likely to admit their voting preference. Unlike 1997 — and 2024 — there wasn’t an overwhelming desire for change in 1992.

MRP polls have predicted a historic Labour landslide in today’s election. (The most damning polls for the Tories have been those commissioned by The Daily Telegraph, which predicted a “wipeout” on 15th January and 20th June.) Although the six-week election campaign was disastrous for the Conservatives, it was only on election day itself that The Sun came out in favour of Starmer. The paper’s support is fairly lukewarm, with a headline calling for a “NEW MANAGER” (a football pun) without naming either Labour leader Keir Starmer or the Labour party directly, in contrast to its enthusiastic endorsement of Blair in 1997. Like Blair, Starmer has courted The Sun during the election campaign, but although newspapers still set the news agenda, they don’t determine election outcomes.

While their influence on party politics is limited, newspapers have more impact on single-issue politics, especially when they cover an issue over an extended period of time. The News of the World’s exposés of Conservative ministers’ sex scandals contrasted with the party’s ‘back to basics’ slogan in the 1990s. The Daily Telegraph’s long-running coverage of the MPs’ expenses scandal in 2009 revealed significant levels of corruption in public office. There is also a pernicious influence: Euroscepticism founded on what Tim Shipman calls “the ‘straight bananas’ school of reporting from Brussels” (invented by Boris Johnson in the 1990s), leading to regular anti-immigration headlines in the Daily Express and Daily Mail that fuel right-wing populism and xenophobia.

“Odey has got away with assaulting and harassing women...”

Hedge fund manager Crispin Odey has filed a defamation lawsuit against the Financial Times newspaper, almost a year after it accused him of sexually assaulting and harassing thirteen women who had worked with him. Odey’s libel suit was filed at the High Court in London today, and he denies all the allegations made against him.

The FT published its investigation into Odey on 10th June last year, as the cover story of its FT Weekend Magazine supplement (no. 1,026). The magazine’s stark headline read: “Crispin Odey has got away with assaulting and harassing women for 25 years”. The article, titled “THE GAMBLER” (pp. 18–25), was written by Madison Marriage, Antonia Cundy, and Paul Caruana Galizia.

100 Greatest Films Ever

Daily Mail film critic Brian Viner has compiled a list of the 100 greatest films ever made, in a cover story for today’s issue of the newspaper’s Weekend magazine supplement. The list skews towards mainstream titles, as Viner readily acknowledges: “I’ve deliberately left out some of the mighty early silents, and there aren’t too many foreign-language films because this has to be an accessible collection.” Another stipulation is that all titles are available on streaming platforms, thus disqualifying some esoteric arthouse films. (The Mail published a previous list of Viner’s 100 favourite films in 2020.)

The 100 Greatest Films Ever are as follows:

100. Oliver!
99. Thelma and Louise
98. Raiders of the Lost Ark
97. Goldfinger
96. In the Heat of the Night
95. This Is Spinal Tap
94. To Kill a Mockingbird
93. The Sting
92. The Vanishing
91. When We Were Kings
90. Twelve Angry Men
89. It Happened One Night
88. Chariots of Fire
87. Shane
86. Kes
85. The Exorcist
84. High Noon
83. All the President’s Men
82. Parasite
81. Star Wars IV
80. Rear Window
79. The Night of the Hunter
78. Get Out
77. Ben-Hur
76. The Best Years of Our Lives
75. Gone with the Wind
74. City Lights
73. Sunset Boulevard
72. Zulu
71. Chinatown
70. The Shining
69. Henry V
68. His Girl Friday
67. Shakespeare in Love
66. The Third Man
65. West Side Story
64. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
63. The Lives of Others
62. Toy Story
61. Spartacus
60. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
59. Apollo 11
58. Deliverance
57. The Elephant Man
56. Tokyo Story
55. Monty Python’s Life of Brian
54. No Country for Old Men
53. The Producers
52. Schindler’s List
51. Boyhood
50. Dr Strangelove
49. The Conversation
48. The Searchers
47. Duck Soup
46. Rome, Open City
45. Nashville
44. On the Waterfront
43. Bicycle Thieves
42. Top Hat
41. All About Eve
40. Vertigo
39. Seven Samurai
38. 2001
37. The Deer Hunter
36. Taxi Driver
35. There Will Be Blood
34. The Bridge on the River Kwai
33. The General
32. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
31. It’s a Wonderful Life
30. Pulp Fiction
29. Raging Bull
28. Annie Hall
27. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
26. Alien
25. The French Connection
24. The Maltese Falcon
23. The Silence of the Lambs
22. Kind Hearts and Coronets
21. The Sound of Music
20. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
19. The Banshees of Inisherin
18. Double Indemnity
17. Brief Encounter
16. Modern Times
15. Shoah
14. The Apartment
13. Singin’ in the Rain
12. Apocalypse Now
11. Bonnie and Clyde
10. Citizen Kane
9. The Graduate
8. Lawrence of Arabia
7. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
6. Casablanca
5. Some Like It Hot
4. Jaws
3. Psycho
2. The Wizard of Oz
1. The Godfather

(Note that Some Like It Hot is the 1959 comic masterpiece, not the unrelated 1939 comedy. The Maltese Falcon is the John Huston remake, rather than the 1931 original version.)

James Dyson v. Daily Mirror:“Honest comment, however wounding...”

James Dyson has lost his libel case against the Daily Mirror. Dyson had sued the newspaper over a column by Brian Reade published last year describing his business strategy as “screw your country, and if anyone complains, tell them to suck it up.”

The article was published on the Mirror’s website on 28th January last year, and appeared in the following day’s print edition (p. 19). Judge Robert Jay ruled that the column was an expression of personal opinion, and therefore not defamatory: “The scope for honest comment, however wounding and unbalanced, was very considerable indeed.”

Jay became famous as counsel to the 2011–2012 Leveson Inquiry into media ethics and practices, when his questioning of witnesses was televised. A year ago, Dyson lost another libel case, against Channel 4 and ITN.

James Dyson v. Daily Mirror:“These allegations represent a personal attack...”

James Dyson is suing the Daily Mirror newspaper over an article published last year describing his business strategy as “screw your country, and if anyone complains, tell them to suck it up.” The column, by Brian Reade, criticised poor public role models, and mentioned Dyson only briefly.

The article was published on the Mirror’s website on 28th January last year, and appeared in the print edition on the following day (p. 19). It has now been removed from the website, and deleted from online newspaper archives.

Dyson appeared at the Royal Courts of Justice in London yesterday, and issued a written statement about the article: “These allegations represent a personal attack on all that I have done and achieved in my lifetime and are highly distressing and hurtful.” He has accused the Mirror of defamation.

Dyson had previously filed a libel suit against Channel 4 and ITN, though that case was dismissed on 31st October last year. Judge Matthew Nicklin ruled that Dyson had not been personally implicated: “The broadcast is simply not about him, and no ordinary reasonable viewer could conclude that he was being in any way criticised.”

“This image may be worth a million words...”

Israel and Hamas have been at war since 7th October and, as in previous conflicts, news organisations are making editorial judgements about publishing images of casualties. On 12th October, the Israeli government’s X account posted three photographs of children killed by Hamas; The Daily Telegraph newspaper printed one of those images the following day (p. 3), with the child’s face blurred. The newspaper’s headline paraphrased US Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “This image may be worth a million words”.

On its website on 13th November, The New York Times published an op-ed by Lydia Polgreen describing a photo taken by Mahmud Hams showing six dead children at a Gaza morgue, though her editor decided against reproducing the image in full. Instead, a cropped version was used, showing only the lower halves of the children’s faces.

The NYT’s front page on 20th November featured a photograph showing the shrouded body of eight-month-old Misk Joudeh, her face and arm visible as her remaining family members gathered around in mourning. She had been killed, alongside her parents, by an Israeli airstrike last month. (The image, taken by Samar Abu Elouf, was reprinted on the front page of the paper’s international edition yesterday.)

As Polgreen wrote in her online op-ed: “It is a rare thing for mainstream news organizations to publish graphic images of dead or wounded children. Rightly so. There is nothing quite so devastating as the image of a child whose life has been snuffed out by senseless violence.” This was also true in 2015, when The Independent newspaper published a photograph of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach, on its front page.

The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921:The Golden Age of Graphic Journalism

Alexander Roob’s The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921: The Golden Age of Graphic Journalism, published earlier this year by Taschen, is a stunning 600-page survey of illustrations from nineteenth and early twentieth century newspapers and magazines. The book features hundreds of images, many of which are full-page and double-page reproductions (such as the John Leech drawing from Punch magazine that first used the word ‘cartoon’ to refer to satirical art), and it includes a comprehensive bibliography.

A prologue outlines the early history of press graphics, from the late sixteenth century onwards, though the book’s starting point is 1819. This was the year of the Peterloo massacre in Manchester, England, and William Hone and George Cruikshank’s pamphlet The Political House That Jack Built, published in response to the tragedy, which “established the era of pictorial journalism”.

Roob examines the technical developments in printing over the period, from wood engraving and lithography in the 1870s to photoxylography a century later. There is also extensive coverage of caricature and political satire, including Charles Philipon’s cartoons of the French King Louis-Philippe.

Philipon was arrested for treason after drawing Louis-Philippe as a plasterer in La Caricature on 30th June 1831. At his trial, he mischievously demonstrated that the King’s likeness could be discerned in almost anything, even a pear, and that fruit became a symbol of Louis-Philippe in subsequent illustrations by Philipon and others. On 27th February 1834, Philipon’s magazine Le Charivari (‘hullabaloo’) published a front-page editorial about the King in the form of a calligram, with the text typeset to resemble a pear.

Philipon’s pear sketches, and a caricature of Louis-Philippe as Gargantua by Honoré Daumier, are reproduced in The Art of Controversy. There is a chapter on press graphics in History of Illustration. The History of Press Graphics 1819–1921 is published in a folio format, the same size as Taschen’s Information Graphics, History of Information Graphics, Understanding the World, and Logo Modernism.

Beyond the Headlines:The Challenges of Reporting Protests in Thailand

A two-day exhibition, Beyond the Headlines: The Risks of Reporting Protests in Thailand, was held at 1559 Space in Bangkok on 30th April and 1st May. The exhibition focused on the dangers journalists faced while covering the anti-government student protests that took place between 2020 and 2022, and included photographs of the protests. A short documentary on press coverage of the 16th October 2020 protest at Siam Square, ‘Watch’dog: (ส่องสื่อผ่านสายตานักศึกษาในเหตุการณ์ 16 ตุลาฯ), was screened on both days.

An expanded version of the exhibition opened yesterday at the same venue, and runs until 20th September. The new exhibition, with a slightly revised subtitle — The Challenges of Reporting Protests in Thailand — ncludes coverage of ‘Black May’ 1992 and the red-shirt and yellow-shirt rallies, in addition to the anti-government student protests. Exhibits include back issues of the Bangkok Post newspaper.

Front Page — Headline

Last week, the Museum of Popular History organised an exhibition of vintage newspapers at the offices of iLaw in Bangkok. Front Page — Headline (บันทึกไว้บนหน้าหนึ่ง) was open from 3rd–8th September, and featured front pages covering historic political events such as the 14th October 1973 protest, the 2010 massacre, the 2006 and 2014 coups, Move Forward’s election victory, and the return of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

A reproduction of the infamous 6th October 1976 Dao Siam (ดาวสยาม) front page was also included. For many years, there was an unspoken taboo against reprinting the page in its complete form: it was removed before the opening of Thammasat University’s exhibition commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the 1976 massacre, and did not reappear until the 2020 exhibition. Although the headline appears in พลกแผนด นประวตการเมองไทย 24 มย 2475 ถง 14 ตค 2516 (‘overturning the history of Thai politics from 23rd June 1932 to 14th October 1973’), the photograph was blacked out.

The complete Dao Siam front page was first reproduced in Sarakadee (สำรคดี) magazine (vol. 28, no. 238), though it was not included in the online version of the article. In the past few years, it has appeared in four books: Prism of Photography (ปริซึมของภาพถ่าย), 45 ปี 6 ตุลาฯ (‘45 years of 6th Oct.’), Moments of Silence, and สงครามเย็น (ใน)ระหว่าง โบว์ขาว (‘the Cold War (in)between the white bow’). Exceptionally, it was displayed on the street outside Kinjai Contemporary gallery in Bangkok last year.

This year, artist Amnard Yensabai included the front page in one of the paintings in his ศิลปะบันทึก series. A caption is also incorporated into the painting, accusing Dao Siam by name of being the mass media entity most responsible for “จุดชนวน” — ‘sparking’ — the massacre in 1976.

Sondhi Limthongkul:“I will definitely sue…”

Media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul has filed defamation charges against the online news organisation Prachatai. The lawsuit, issued on 22nd August, claims that Prachatai misrepresented Sondhi’s opinion and falsely implied that he supports another coup. Addressing Prachatai via Manager (ผู้จัดการรายวัน), the newspaper he owns, he said: “I will definitely sue... be prepared to receive a summons”.

In a Facebook post on 31st July, Sondhi had speculated on the future of Thai politics, listing thirteen potential scenarios, the last of which was a coup, which he described as “ไร้ความชอบธรรม” (‘illegitimate’). Later that day, Prachatai reported Sondhi’s comments on its website, though its headline omitted the word ‘illegitimate’.

Prachatai’s headline arguably did misrepresent Sondhi’s comments. But the first sentence of the article rectified this by quoting his reference to an ‘illegitimate coup’. The article also went on to quote Sondhi’s list of thirteen scenarios in full.

Whatever Sondhi’s current view on the legitimacy of coups, he has certainly supported them in the past. Prachatai quoted him on 21st January 2012, speaking on ASTV: “Soldiers, don’t sit still. Come out and seize power.” That was an unequivocal call for a coup, accurately summed up by Prachatai’s headline at the time: “Sondhi urges military to stage a coup”.

Other news organisations have also quoted Sondhi appearing to endorse coups. In an interview with the Bangkok Post exactly fifteen years ago (26th August 2008, p. 3), he said that “soldiers today are cowards”, implying that they were not brave enough to launch another coup. The New York Times quoted him saying: “I see a coup as not a bad thing,” and reported that “Sondhi publicly called for yet another military intervention” (3rd November 2020, p. 10; reprinted in the next day’s international edition, p. 3).

Sondhi’s PAD campaign paved the way for the 2006 coup, either intentionally or otherwise. At that time, Sondhi also sued another news outlet for defamation, claiming that Kom Chad Luek (คมชัดลึก) had misrepresented his comments about King Rama IX. In that case, the editor resigned and the newspaper suspended publication for five days.

BirGün

A Turkish journalist has been charged with encouraging terrorist organisations to target counterterrorism officials, and faces up to three years in jail if convicted. The charge stems from a complaint by Akın Gürlek, a government minister and former judge, who was mentioned in a newspaper article by Ayça Söylemez.

The article, which had the ironic headline “Yetenekli hâkim bey” (‘the talented judge’), was published by BirGün on 18th February 2020. In a statement to police after her arrest, Söylemez explained that she was merely giving background details on the judicial cases Gürlek presided over, “which are already publicly available information. Therefore, it cannot be said that I made Akın Gürlek a target of any organization.”

Bastardgate

Next month marks the 30th anniversary of the ‘bastardgate’ scandal, when former UK prime minister John Major was recorded calling three of his cabinet ministers “bastards”. Major was speaking to ITN political editor Michael Brunson in an off-the-record conversation in Downing Street on 23rd July 1993, after they had taped a television interview. The exchange was not broadcast, but the cameras were still rolling.

Discussing current and former ministers who were briefing journalists against his policies on Europe, Major told Brunson: “You and I can both think of ex-ministers who are going around causing all sorts of trouble. Do we want three more of the bastards out there?” This was widely regarded as a reference to the Eurosceptic cabinet ministers Michael Portillo, Peter Lilley, and Michael Howard.

The Observer newspaper published lengthy quotes from the “remarkably frank” conversation two days after it was recorded. Two days after that, the Daily Mirror printed the entire transcript (headlined “THE ‘BASTARDS’ TAPE IN FULL”). The tabloid also gave away free bastardgate cassettes to readers who sent in coupons. (The tapes began with an introduction by then-editor David Banks, who said: “this tape signifies our stand against the establishment’s attempts to gag this great newspaper.”)

Major devoted a chapter of his memoir to the controversy, admitting that he had been “careless... to have spoken to Brunson so freely”. At a lunch for Westminster journalists in 2013, he said that the “bastards” comment was “unforgivable”, then paused for effect and added: “My only excuse is that it was true.”

The Mirror’s bastardgate splash was followed a day later by the leaking of a different off-the-record conversation between Major and another journalist, Jonathan Dimbleby. This second recording was obtained by the Mirror’s tabloid rival The Sun, which dubbed it ‘Majorgate’. Speaking in 1992, Major could be heard complaining to Dimbleby that Conservative voters often refuse to take part in exit polls, which he described as “a high fuck-up factor among Tories.”

Bastardgate and Majorgate came shortly after two royal ‘-gate’ scandals, ‘Dianagate’ and ‘Camillagate’, which also involved illicitly recorded conversations. The ‘-gate’ suffix, most recently applied to ‘partygate’, originated with the Watergate scandal in the US.

‘The trial of the century’

Ben Roberts-Smith — a Victoria Cross recipient and former SAS soldier — has lost his libel suit against three Australian newspapers that had accused him of war crimes. The case has been dubbed ‘the trial of the century’ by the Australian media, as Roberts-Smith is the country’s most-decorated living soldier and the newspapers had accused him of murdering unarmed prisoners of war in Afghanistan.

The allegations against Roberts-Smith were first published by The Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times, and The Age. He was not named in the initial reports, in June 2018, though his identity was revealed two months later. Australian police launched an investigation into the claims, though no criminal charges were brought, and Roberts-Smith sued for defamation.

Yesterday, judge Anthony Besanko ruled in the publishers’ favour, finding that most of the allegations against Roberts-Smith were true. The verdict in this civil defamation case has destroyed the reputation of an Australian national hero, and it may lead to calls for a reopening of the criminal investigation into Roberts-Smith’s war crimes.

Sazandegi

The newspaper Sazandegi (سازندگی) was shut down by the Iranian regime last month after it reported on the country’s economic crisis. The subheading of a 20th February front-page story about the rising price of lamb — “گوشت چگونه از سفره طبقه متوسط و طبقه کارگر حذف شد؟” (‘why is meat missing from the tables of the middle and working classes?’) — led to the newspaper’s immediate suspension. Its permission to publish was reinstated on 1st March.

Sazandegi previously attracted controversy when it was sued by the Speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, over a front-page editorial and cartoon published on 26th May 2021. The drawing of the Speaker, by controversial cartoonist Hadi Haydari, suggested that he was anxious about, and therefore implicitly guilty of, allegations that he had interfered in the allocation of the budget.

International Examiner

Thai Cinema Uncensored has been reviewed in the International Examiner, a fortnightly newspaper published in Seattle, Washington. A headline in the 21st September 2022 issue (vol. 49, no. 18) describes the book as “an illuminating work of resistance to censorship” (p. 6).

In her review, Elinor Serumgard says: “Matthew Hunt writes with a sense of urgency to legitimize these films and work towards a future where Thai filmmakers make the films they want without having to worry if people will be able to watch them. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of Thai films and the history that has shaped them.”

Thai Cinema Uncensored has also been reviewed by the Bangkok Post newspaper, the academic journal Sojourn, and the magazines Art Review and The Big Chilli. An online review was published by the 101 World website.

“A relentless barrage of highly personal attacks...”

The long-running BBC1 satirical panel show Have I Got News for You marked the end of Boris Johnson’s premiership with a special episode titled Have I Got News for Boris on 2nd September. The programme recounted Johnson’s numerous scandals (such as unlawfully proroguing parliament and breaking coronavirus pandemic restrictions), though two words in the script — “cosmic cunt” — ed to tabloid outrage two days later. The Mail on Sunday’s front-page headline on 4th September was “BBC COMIC’S C-WORD JIBE AGAINST PM”.

The Mail accused presenter Jack Dee of insulting Johnson, though in fact the alliterative pejorative was a quote from The Times, which attributed it to an unnamed cabinet minister in an article published on 9th July. The Mail’s hyperbolic description of the show as “a relentless barrage of highly personal attacks” and “a torrent of ‘spiteful and crass insults’” is an indication of its anti-BBC bias. (The Kunts released a CD single in 2020 titled Boris Johnson Is a Fucking Cunt.)

There have been two previous front-page tabloid headlines about the c-word. On 4th February 2017, The Sun (“BECKS C-WORD FURY AT ‘SIR’ SNUB”) revealed a leaked email in which ex-footballer David Beckham had called the Honours Committee “unappreciative cunts”. (Beckham had obtained an injunction preventing The Sunday Times from publishing the email, though other papers were not bound by it.) On 15th May 2015, the Daily Star (“BEEB CALLS FARAGE C-WORD ON TELLY”) gleefully highlighted a slip of the tongue by journalist Norman Smith, who had referred to politician Nigel Farage as a “cunt” rather than a ‘cult’ during a live BBC News TV report.

Dianagate

This month marks the thirtieth anniversary of the so-called ‘Dianagate’ scandal, the publication of a telephone conversation between Princess Diana and James Gilbey, with whom she was having an affair. A transcript of their phone call was printed in The Sun newspaper on 24th August 1992, under the banner headline “MY LIFE IS TORTURE”. The headline is a quote from the tape: Diana says that Prince Charles “makes my life real, real torture, I’ve decided.” (The tape was later sampled by the techno band House of Windsor for their novelty single Squidgy, a reference to Gilbey’s pet name for Diana, and Dianagate is also known as ‘Squidgygate’.)

According to The Sun, the call was accidentally recorded by a radio ham, Cyril Reenan, on New Year’s Eve 1989. A second amateur radio enthusiast, Jane Norgrove, subsequently provided the paper with her own tape of the call. The clarity of the tapes, and the unlikely coincidence of two accidental recordings of such a significant conversation, led to (as yet unproven) allegations that landlines in royal residences had been tapped.

Such speculation increased when a phone call between Charles and his mistress, Camilla Parker-Bowles, was also leaked. The transcript of this so-called ‘Camillagate’ tape — recorded a fortnight before Diana’s call, on 18th December 1989 — was first published by New Idea on 23rd January 1993. At the time, the magazine was owned by Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of The Sun, and it’s likely that the story was planted in an Australian magazine to provide some distance from Murdoch’s UK tabloids. Camillagate caused even more of a sensation than Dianagate, as the conversation was more directly sexual, and Charles was recorded joking about being reincarnated as his lover’s tampon: “God forbid, a Tampax!”