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 revealed in the failed Reynolds case and in the successful WSJ case is instructive.
In the first case, in 1998, the Irish Prime Minister, Albert Reynolds (right), sued the Sunday Times for alleging he had deliberately misled parliament and others about the appointment of the president of the high court.
The paper's defence failed because it did not convince the court that it had handled the information responsibly. For example, when the reporter was asked why his account hadn't included Reynolds's explanation of his actions, he replied: "Because I had decided that... he had no defence." Why hadn't he taken notes? "Because I was not in note-taking mode."
By contrast the efforts made by the WSJ reporters, as outlined by one of them in an article in the Guardian, are a model of painstaking diligence and fairness. Here is just one example. There is a Fleet Street mantra (not always observed) that you must have two sources for everything. According to the WSJ reporter, James M Dorsey, he |
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| In 1998 the Irish PM, Albert Reynolds, sued the Sunday Times for alleging he had misled parliament |
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excluded one fascinating piece of information "because the name had only been authenticated by four of my five sources." Five sources! Blimey.
British journalists often accuse their American counterparts and their publications of being bland, worthy and boring, and find their obsessive fact-checkers just too tedious for words. But if only a British paper could emulate the Wall Street Journal's performance in the field, it might well equal its triumph in court. That really would be a cause for British journalists to rejoice. 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 18, 2006
DON BERRY worked with the Insight team at the Sunday Times in the 1970s and 1980s
 PHILIP JACOBSON on the murder of Anna Politkovskaya
ROBERT FOX on the sackings at the Daily Telegraph
CHARLES LAURENCE on the banning of Carmen Callil's book launch
MARAGETA PAGANO on Fleet Street's afternoon free-for-all
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