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Libel verdict gives restaurant reviewers indigestion
Caterer and Hotelkeeper
01 February 2007
The iconic Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas” featured violence and language that was hard to stomach. Now a Belfast Italian restaurant of the same name has achieved a libel verdict in a Court action against the Irish News which will prove equally unpalatable to restaurant reviewers throughout the land.
The paper’s food critic, Caroline Workman, had delivered a damning judgment on the West Belfast eatery in a review published in the Irish News in the 2000. Instead of swallowing the criticism, owner, Ciaran Convery, decided to fight back against what he considered a “hatchet job” by suing the newspaper in which it appeared. Last week, a libel jury awarded Convery £25,000 in damages.
The response from the media on both sides of the Irish sea has been predictable, describing the decision as a threat to freedom of the press. Indeed, the National Union of Journalists is supporting the Irish News in its appeal. Anxious reviewers have wondered whether the end is nigh for their lucrative corner of journalism.
But before joining the gloom-mongers, perhaps one should pause to consider the legal position and whether this verdict does in fact signal anything of significance.
A defamatory publication is one which lowers you in the eyes of right thinking members of society. A scathing restaurant review certainly does that. Consequently, one then has to consider the defences which the newspaper and its reviewer might be able to raise to defeat a libel action by the defamed restaurant owner based on such a review.
First, it could maintain that the criticisms were justified, in which case the burden would be on the newspaper to prove that what it said was true.
Alternatively, it could raise the defence of fair (or more accurately, honest) comment. In other words, it could seek to persuade the Court that what was published was clearly opinion based on the true background facts.
If a newspaper satisfies the Court that its article was true, then that provides a complete defence. However, fair comment can be defeated if the claimant demonstrates that the article was published maliciously. That is a difficult hurdle to surmount because it would requires the claimant to prove that the reviewer either knew the words were false (or did not care either way) or that he published them for some other dominant improper motive. Proving another’s state of mind at a particular time is a difficult task.
One assumes the Irish News relied on both the defences of justification and fair comment in the Goodfellas case. A libel trial is conducted before a judge and jury, and it is the jury which decides on liability. That means that it was a panel of members of the Irish public who decided that the newspaper had failed, on the balance of probabilities, to persuade it that the review in question was either true or honest comment. Presumably, having heard the evidence, they agreed with Mr Convery’s conclusion that on this occasion, the review in question was indeed a “hatchet job”.
The truth is that each libel case turns on its own facts, and the Goodfellas judgment sets no precedent and does not mean that the defences outlined above have been swept away. It may, however, make restaurant reviewers a little more cautious in future about sticking the knife in. Sometimes the target of such a review may decide to bite back. And if that knowledge keeps reviewers honest, is that such a bad thing?
Jeremy Clarke-Williams is joint head of defamation at law firm Russell Jones & Walker.