The Reaearch On Defense Of Privilege Against News Torts

In British and American defamation law, the privilege defense is as important as defense of truth and fair comment. Because the privilege defense is a direct and effective way to reduce the burden of verifying, domestic theory circles pay attention to its importance.Through research on the origin, development and current situation of the privilege in the British and the US, we can see that the privilege in the British and the US bases on and values public interest. A complete system is established through statutory and case, which give the meida effective protection on freedom, and balance the personal interest and public interest. By contrast, Chinese media enjoys a relatively narrow range of qualified privilege and more restrictions. Meanwhile, trial of the privilege cases is not ideal.The burden of testification is too heavy for the media, some chinese scholars claim to learn the practice of the British and the US, in order to expand the scope of the qualified privilege. However, due to limited understanding of the privilege in the British and the US, and the lack of careful consideration of the domestic situation, the advocates seem one-sided and mechanical. This paper focus on the problem of localization of qualified privilege system.This paper intends to explore the way of how to expand the range of qualified privilege system, and search for breakthrough of reducing unreasonable burden of the media be accused of libel. It has summarized the origin, development and current situation of the qualified privilege in the British and the US, extracted a number of legislative norms and jurisprudence containing value of reference, and further compared the differences between British model and U.S. model. The paper has analysed the characteristics of the trial and the legislation of qulified privilege defence in China, combining with the media environment. And it argues the possibility of absorbtion of the Anglo-American experience, explore a way of developing the qualifed privilege defense with absorbtion of exsiting experience and combination of Chinese characteristics.