Defamation and Journalism

Co45

I am currently studying law and am moving onto defamation in the next few weeks. I've been googling defamation and it's effects on the media in particular as that is one of the topics coming up and I'm a bit confused.
The new defamation act ensures that all sources must be verified by the media before publishing, was this not always the case?? Maybe I am missing something here but from what I can see the defamation act hasn't changed anything in the way the media reports?

Tom Young

That would be correct.

dermot_sheehan

New act puts a new defence in, defence of reasonable journalistic coverage of something of public interest.

To use this defence you must behave reasonably (i.e. verify sources if possible).

Under old law defamationw as strict liability, the newspaper had to cough up if it was false even if the newspaper acted reasonably in attempting to verify sources.

bahhoweya

http://www.algoodbody.ie/GetAttachment.aspx?id=b8103e1b-1270-409c-803d-c2ad85cea77a

I found the above link pretty useful for the basics, it goes through the main provisions, changes etc

Grolschevik

Cover story of the current Law Society Gazette...

http://www.lawsociety.ie/en/Gazette/

pirelli

The new statute of limitations in teh new defemation act are 1 year and i think 2 years for exceptional reasons.

What are the statute of limitations for the written libels that were committed a couple of years ago. It was orgionally 6 years for libel and 3 years for slander.