Slander Is Libelous

Are radio's scandalmongers committing libel when they broadcast defamatory remarks from a script--or is it just slander?* Until last week this was a wide-open legal question. Then the New York Court of Appeals provided an answer by handing down a unanimous and--to radio--chilling decision.

The man most immediately affected was Walter Winchell (an old hand at libel suits), who had sought dismissal of a $50,000 action. George W. Hartmann, a onetime Columbia University professor, had accused Winchell of libeling him on a January 1944 broadcast.

Said concurring Justice Stanley H. Fuld: "When account is taken of the vast and far-flung audience reached by radio today--often far greater in number than the readers of the largest metropolitan newspaper--it is evident that the broadcast of scandalous utterances is ... [as] harmful to the defamed person's reputation as a publication by writing. . . ."

* Slander is defamation by word of mouth, legally a rather minor offense. Libel, much more serious, has always been defined by the law books as defamation by printed word.

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