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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

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The Economist is a pretty reputable publication. Yes they have some biases but “slander” is a strong term that insinuates that it doesn’t have a strong grounding in facts or is written to explicitly cause uproar and not inform. It belongs to places like The Sun or The Daily Mail.

Would you please point to an example or two where it is so one-sided that it’s far from the truth?

Plus, if you write it down it’s libel not slander. And given the ridiculous libel laws in the UK, to do so would not be a good idea.

Stronger: The Economist is used to having to operate under UK libel laws, which are far stronger than US laws. Truth is an absolute defense against a claim of libel in the US; in the UK it isn't.

So accusing them of slander is not particularly believable. I'd need to see a specific claim, evidence that the claim was false, and evidence that the falsehood rose to the legal standard of slander. A bare claim, with no evidence, just looks like overheated rhetoric by someone who doesn't like The Economist's position, but who can't actually do the work of refuting it.

Slander implies a false statement that caused damages.

Damages are only required (in certain countries) for a legal case of slander to be successful, they're not needed to fulfil the definition of slander.

It would be slander if I said the words "HN user drw85 has never said a sentence that didn't contain racist abuse", even if my saying it has no impact on you or anyone at all.

(Just as it would be libellous - the equivalent of slanderous but for written rather than spoken lies about people - if I wrote a comment here on HN accusing you of being a mass murderer, even if you don't notice the comment and no law enforcement ever consider it of interest nor any other effects.)

Well, the definition literally says:

'a false, spoken statement about someone which damages that person's reputation, or the making of such a statement'

I guess the distinction is important, because i could make a false statement that is not damaging, like 'swores has a red nose.', which might be a joke and thus is a false statement but not damaging nor slander.

In the US, reporting true things is literally never considered slander [0][1][2].

The legal system has recognized truth as a wholly adequate defense to claims of defamation (which includes slander) dating back to 1734 [3] - before the Constitution even written (1787).

[0] - "Under the United States law, a statement cannot be held to be actionable as slanderous or libellous if the statement is true but has "slight inaccuracies of expression", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_truth

[1] - "Truth is widely accepted as a complete defense to all defamation claims." https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation

[2] - "Truth is an absolute defense to defamation." https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/privileges-defenses-...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Peter_Zenger

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