Word ‘alleged’ is no protection against libel

What you need to know:

  • If I had just arrived in Nairobi from the moon, picked up your newspaper and, for some reason, gone straight to that caption, I would have been profoundly perplexed.
  • The question is: How does the adverb “allegedly” protect the reporter and his newspaper from the law?
  • That your use of allegedly is purely tautological is the reason the adverb will never protect you from libel charges. More than that, a caption should be self-contained.

Kenya’s newspapers use the adverb allegedly in attempts to protect themselves from libel suits. But they should be intelligent about it.

Take this caption from the April 27 number of the Standard: “Knut and Kuppet want Kaimenyi sacked for allegedly coming up with unacceptable policies at the ministry...”

For those with no time to wade through a story as long-winded and as badly written as faced us around the page-two picture, and for the many readers who had never heard of “Knut” and “Kuppet”, the caption should have included a few more vital facts, including the full names of the two teachers’ unions perennially at daggers-drawn against each other.

If I had just arrived in Nairobi from the moon, picked up your newspaper and, for some reason, gone straight to that caption, I would have been profoundly perplexed. One of my first questions would have been: “What on earth is Kaimenyi or Knut or Kuppet?” In the caption’s silence on that question, I was likely to conclude that these were government agencies.

The question is: Has this “Kaimenyi” ever “come up” with “...unacceptable policies at the ministry...”? According to the Standard, not really: only “allegedly”. As to who exactly has made such an allegation and as to why the policies are “unacceptable” to him, we get not a single word from the reporter.

PROTECT THE REPORTER

The question is: How does the adverb “allegedly” protect the reporter and his newspaper from the law?

The honest answer is: Nohow. For the verb to allege simply means to say, to utter, to declare or to affirm something without offering any proof. Like the liberal politician, the liberal media prefer political colour to social substance.

As a rule, too, mendacity and self-aggrandisement are the whole content of the political colour. It follows, therefore, that if the political newsmaker were constrained to furnish every statement with a proof, we would have no newspapers or other news media. Thus what pose as “news” in our newspapers are nothing but allegations.

The reporter is thus uttering disgusting tautology whenever he uses the adjective alleged or the adverb allegedly to describe such an allegation from a politician. He or she IS merely attempting to “substantiate the obvious”, as pro tem House Speaker Jean Marie Seroney once dismissed such parliamentary piffle.

That your use of allegedly is purely tautological is the reason the adverb will never protect you from libel charges. More than that, a caption should be self-contained.

Except under a mugshot, a caption should be a summary of the whole story, including most, if not all, of the content of the “inverted pyramid” which Euro-American newspapers invented when the telegraph, an extremely costly contraption, was the only long-distance news-gathering technology.

A pyramid is a structure that tapers upwards. A news item was likened to an inverted pyramid because the report was required to taper downwards, bunching at the top all the “Ws” of journalism – what, when, where, who, why and how – so that every story gradually lost its news significance as one read it downwards.