Journalist's privilege set against reputation of former OPP officer

It's about time for journalists to write fact and be held accountable for what they say as writing as in this Toronto Globe and Mail article. I'm tired of hearing fiction or the opinions of reporters unless it's in an Opinion Column and it's about time they do something for us to hear truths and facts.

Journalists' privilege set against reputation of former OPP officer
JOANNA SMITH
June 16, 2007

The way Ontario judges decide defamation cases is at stake after a lawyer for the Ottawa Citizen suggested laws be updated to reflect Canadian journalism in the 21st century.

The case put before the Ontario Court of Appeal yesterday concerns two articles the Citizen published about former OPP officer Danno Cusson, who travelled to ground zero with his dog to help with search-and-rescue efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In April of 2006 a jury ordered the newspaper to pay Mr. Cusson $100,000 in damages after finding that he had been libelled in a pair of articles by two reporters that appeared in September of 2001.

The jury found most of what the reporters wrote to be true - including that Mr. Cusson's dog had no formal K-9 certification and that he had misled officials into thinking he was an RCMP officer - but also that it contained false statements or unfair comments.

Originally, Mr. Cusson had sued a third reporter, but the trial judge ruled the article he wrote was shielded by the defence of qualified privilege. The defence protects journalists from liability in circumstances where they have a duty to report on subjects of public interest.

The Citizen's lawyer, Rick Dearden, argued before a panel of three judges yesterday that the same defence should have protected the first pair of articles.

To succeed at the classic defence of qualified privilege, the judge must find the journalist had a duty to share the information and that the public had an interest in receiving it. The reporters must also be found to have acted without malice, something the jury had done in this case.

Yesterday, Mr. Dearden asked the judges to consider a new approach to qualified privilege called the Reynolds-Jameel defence, based on two libel cases the British House of Lords has ruled on in recent years.

The Reynolds-Jameel method asks whether the story was a matter of public interest, whether the defamatory statement was necessary to the article, and whether the reporters exercised "responsible journalism."

Mr. Dearden argued existing law has "undesirable rigidity," punishing reporters for statements found to be false even when they did everything they could to ensure their truth. The new approach should be used "to allow the media room to make a mistake on issues of great importance," he said.

Mr. Cusson's lawyer, Ronald Caza, expressed concerns that bringing the Reynolds-Jameel approach to Canada would cause "fundamental change" in Canadian law, which tends to favour protecting an individual's reputation over freedom of expression. "You don't have the right to publish things that aren't true," Mr. Caza said.

Peter Jacobsen, a lawyer who intervened on behalf of The Globe and Mail and other news organizations, said in an interview that the new approach would allow journalists "to have greater certainty, because we know that if we practise good journalism and it's in the public interest, then we're going to be granted the privilege."