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Jury fall out over damages in case of 'reckless pen': Peter Pringle reports from New York on a writer found guilty of making up quotes in a 'New Yorker' article

Peter Pringle
Friday 04 June 1993 23:02 BST
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IT WAS a great case for the libel voyeur, but not so good for journalism. A spindly, prim New Yorker writer was pitted against a garrulous, permanently tanned dissident Freudian psychoanalyst from California. Positively tout literary, journalistic, legal and psycho whatever communities on both the East and the West Coast of America were titillated by the affair, the New York Times informed its readers.

After almost a month in court the jury of seven women and one man found the writer, Janet Malcolm, had defamed the psychoanalyst, Jeffrey Masson, but they could not decide how much he should receive in damages. They balked at the dollars 7.5m ( pounds 5m) he asked for, and wanted to give him more than the symbolic penny but quite how much they thought was fair is not clear because, unlike most American jurors, they refused to talk about the case. Their indecision will almost certainly result in another court appearance to decide the money part, and possibly a whole new trial.

In the legal pause, there is a chance to reflect. The jury found that Ms Malcolm had made up or materially altered five quotations from Mr Masson, that two of them were defamatory and that she acted with 'reckless disregard' for accuracy. The two quotations in question were printed in the New Yorker a decade ago and relate to Mr Masson's comments about the Freud Archives where he used to work but was dismissed as a dissident.

One said he had planned to turn the gloomy archives into a 'place of sex, women and fun' and another that his bosses 'had the wrong man if they expected (him) to remain silent about his dismissal'.

Four of the disputed quotations do not appear as written on 40 hours of tapes between the author and Mr Masson, but three were on Ms Malcolm's typewritten notes. A fifth Ms Malcolm said she remembered. The incomplete record led the jury to concentrate on Ms Malcolm's style of gathering information as much, if not more, than it did on whether Mr Masson was defamed. Largely, the case turned into a debate about journalistic ethics and the sanctity of the quotation.

For an outside observer it was hard to imagine that the pale, bookish Ms Malcolm in her sensible clothes and her designer spectacles was capable of making things up. But her colleagues dumped on her. She gives journalism a very bad name, said one, referring to her methods. There are standards in collecting quotes, said another, and Ms Malcolm broke them.

In America, as elsewhere, those standards range widely. At one end the purist will not accept any changes, and at the other a quote can be a 'composite', or be 'compressed' which is how Ms Malcolm worked. In the middle there are those who argue that as few people speak in perfect sentences their quotes must be tidied up.

Press freedom advocates are worried that in airings of the journalistic craft such as this, the profession suffers because people are given reason to doubt what they've been reading - especially in a magazine famous for accuracy.

(Photograph omitted)

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