Introduction

Chapters 9–11 examine meaning in three areas of media law and regulation in greater detail. In the first of these three chapters, I look at one specific legal cause of action, defamation. I relate arguments about meaning presented earlier in the book to the challenge of deciding what utterances or texts mean in this field of law. Publications or media coverage alleged to be damaging to reputation, I show, are considered in terms of whether they warrant the meaning or meanings pleaded by the complainant to an ‘ordinary reader’ standard of meaning. Where publication was to an audience likely to be split in terms of relevant knowledge available to it, a further notion, that of legal ‘innuendo’ meaning, is invoked. I focus on the boundary between these two notions of meaning: between the ‘natural and ordinary meaning of the words’ available to an ordinary reader and the specialised kind of meaning associated with particular knowledge available only to a given, segmented readership. This distinction between ‘innuendo’ meaning and ‘ordinary-reader’ meaning, I argue, shows up wider problems in how meanings are ascribed and evaluated in defamation.

Libel and the meaning of words

When people involved in a libel action discuss defamation, the ‘-ing’ word they use most is not ‘meaning’ but ‘winning’. Yet despite defamation's lustre of gladiatorial struggle and gold, the protection extended to reputation by this area of law depends crucially on attributions of meaning.