for his distinguishing between meanings which words are capable of bearing and the choice of the one "right" meaning which they bear disappears. …
(Emphasis in original.)
36 It follows, as the respondents correctly submit, that the Court's task is to determine the one sense in which the matter complained of is to be understood.
37 The respondents relied on the reference by Sedley LJ in Ajinomoto Sweeteners Europe SAS v Asda Stores Ltd [2011] QB 497 at [2] to the single meaning rule and to the shifting of the preferred meaning to the middle ground. The respondents made it clear in their oral submissions that they were not suggesting that there was a rule that where various meanings are open, the non-defamatory meaning is to be preferred or that the middle meaning must be adopted as the meaning so that, in the case of criminal or other misconduct, an article could never be read as conveying the meaning of guilt.
38 It was in this context that the applicant referred to the decision of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in Stocker v Stocker [2020] AC 593 (Stocker) and Gatto v Australian Broadcasting Corporation [2022] VSCA 66 (Gatto).
39 In Stocker, Lord Kerr said (at [34], [37] and [38]):
34 … [i]t is clear that the single meaning approach is well entrenched in the law of defamation and neither party in the present appeal sought to impeach it. And, whatever else may be said of it, it provides a practical, workable solution. Where a statement has more than one plausible meaning, the question of whether defamation has occurred can only be answered by deciding that one particular meaning should be ascribed to the statement.
…
37 Clearly, therefore, where a range of meanings is available and where it is possible to light on one meaning which is not defamatory among a series of meanings which are, the court is not obliged to select the non-defamatory meaning. The touchstone remains what would the ordinary reasonable reader consider the words to mean. Simply because it is theoretically possible to come up with a meaning which is not defamatory, the court is not impelled to select that meaning.
38 All of this, of course, emphasises that the primary role of the court is to focus on how the ordinary reasonable reader would construe the words. And this highlights the court's duty to step aside from a lawyerly analysis and to inhabit the world of the typical reader of a Facebook post. To fulfil that obligation, the court should be particularly conscious of the context in which the statement was made, and it is to that subject that I now turn.
