After the Flood

Has the decision of the Court of Appeal in Flood v Times Newspapers [2010] EWCA Civ 804 made the so called "Reynolds Defence" of qualified privilege based on responsible journalism unworkable?

The recent decision of the Court of Appeal in Flood v Times Newspapers has been greeted with dismay by many journalists who feel that it has unrealistically raised the bar on what constitutes "responsible journalism" into something approaching a counsel of perfection. After the House of Lords decision in Jameel v Wall Street Journal in 2007 many in the media started to believe that after an unpromising start where it could rarely be successfully relied on, the "responsible journalism" test laid down in the case of Reynolds a decade earlier was now being interpreted by the Courts with sufficient flexibilty for journalists to rely on the Defence with confidence where they had in good faith published defamatory allegations which ultimately turned out to be wrong but at the time