The Unprofitable Jest

After a federal jury in Manhattan awarded Journalist Quentin Reynolds $175,001 in a libel suit against Hearst Columnist Westbrook Pegler. Hearst lawyers took their case to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Their argument: what Pegler had written about Reynolds (TIME, May 24, 1954, et seq.) was "innocuous and susceptible of innocent and harmless interpretations."

There was nothing wrong, said the Hearst lawyers, with Pegler's writing that "Reynolds went nuding along the public road [with] a wench." After all, "perfectly honorable people are nudists, and . . . nudism [is] not a crime." Pegler's charge that Reynolds proposed marriage to Heywood Broun's widow in the car on the way to Broun's grave was not libelous either, said the lawyers, since even the Mosaic Code imposes "upon a brother the duty of proposing to his dead brother's widow." As for Pegler's charge that Reynolds had "a yellow streak glaring for the world to see," that kind of writing is just "gloating in jesting terms" and does no one any harm.

The three-judge Appeals Court did not find itself guffawing at the jest. Last week Federal Judge Harold R. Medina ruled for the court: "This is a curious and unprofitable sort of jesting, as others may not view the humor in the same light . . . These explanations are wholly without merit or substance." The court unanimously upheld the $175,001 judgment against Pegler and his Hearst employers, who must pay the bill under terms of Pegler's contract. It is one of the biggest libel awards ever given by a U.S. court.

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