Recent events in Australia and France have posed a question over the media’s ability to pass critical comment on people, products or issues. From my perspective, that of individual passing concise, independent and informed comment on the products and people within a particular industry, the warning bells are ringing. In its decision over a defamation case initiated by businessman Joseph Gutnik, the High Court of Australia has decided that he is able to utilise the courts in Victoria to conduct his action against an American provider of business knowledge and opinion, Dow Jones, which published material about Gutnik over its US-based Internet site. The High Court accepted Gutnik’s view that since potential damage was done to his business interests in Victoria, he should have the right to conduct his action here, and not where the article was published. In short, Australia’s highest court is saying that an Internet publisher should be prepared to defend whatever it publishes in each and every corner of the world able to read whatever it publishes. Furthermore, it should now be prepared to defend its content in each and every country, according to the legal processes of that country. I entirely agree with Denis Dutton of New Zealand’s Canterbury University, when he says that: ‘the High Court of Australia ! wants to have it both ways: Australians should be able to sue for defamation on strict Australian criteria but also enjoy freedom of speech as guaranteed by the US Constitution and made available on the Internet. It won’t wash.’ Meanwhile, after a libel suit brought about by 56 winemaking cooperatives, a French magazine has been fined more than A$600,000 for publishing generic comments about wine from Beaujolais. The regional monthly magazine, Lyon Mag, published comments describing Beaujolais wine as ‘fermented fruit juice’ and quoted an independent authority describing it as ‘vin de merde’, which won’t need translation. Although the magazine was perhaps guilty of letting emotion get in the way of factual reporting, this decision opens up another can of worms. Wine companies everywhere are unhappy with some of the comments published by wine writers like me. Yet wine critics are simply publishing an opinion, some of which is better informed than other. If wine writers are ultimately taken to task, as this instance is getting very close to doing, then there will be no more critical assessment of wine. Consumers will receive nothing other than the pile of saccharine and largely incorrect ‘tasting notes’ and opinion that arrives daily on my desk in the form of media releases. And it won’t just be restricted to wine. Try food, theatre, film, motor vehicles, music, etc. If intelligent and perceptive consumers wish to retain their rights to receive critical opinion from independent observers, the time to do something about it is now. Otherwise, those with the paper-thin intellect displayed by the short-sighted inhabitants of courts in Australia and France may well take that right away from you.
