This story is a cautionary tale about checking twice (or even about checking at all) and publishing once. It involves Britain's conservative newspaper The Telegraph and lefty MP George Galloway.

After the fall of Baghdad, the Telegraph found documents that purported to show Galloway had been the recipient of payments from the old Iraqi regime.

Galloway -- a Labour MP who had been a major thorn in British Prime Minister Tony Blair's side for his vociferous opposition to the Iraq war -- sued for libel.

The Telegraph claimed a "public interest" defence and lost to the tune of 150,000 pounds, or about $343,245 Cdn. There may yet be an award on costs.

Here are some excerpts from a BBC story:

Neil Darbyshire, the newspaper's executive editor, said questions arising from the Iraqi documents still needed to be answered by the commissioner.

"It has never been the Telegraph's case to suggest that the allegations contained in these documents are true," he said outside court on Thursday.

"These documents were published by us because their contents raised some very serious questions at a crucial stage in the war against Iraq.

"The Telegraph did not and could not perform a detailed investigation into their contents."

He added: "When we published the documents we did so believing that their contents were important, should be made public and would in due course be investigated by the proper authorities." ....

Mr Justice Eady said: "It was the defendants' primary case that their coverage was no more than 'neutral reportage' of documents discovered by a reporter in the badly-damaged foreign ministry in Baghdad, but the nature, content and tone of their coverage cannot be so described." ...

The judge also found that the Telegraph really didn't give Galloway a fair opportunity to respond. It never showed him the documents or told him it was planning to claim he'd been personally enriched.

In another BBC story, there is talk of the Reynolds defence of "qualified privilege", so called after a case brought by the former Irish prime minister Albert Reynolds against the Sunday Times in 1999.

In that case, the Law Lords ruled that the media could publish information, even if it turned out to be untrue and defamatory, provided the public had the right to know it and it was the product of responsible journalism.

Lord Nicolls, who gave the leading judgement, laid down 10 points which courts might take into account when deciding whether to admit a plea of qualified privilege.

They included the seriousness of the allegation, the source, the steps taken to verify it, the urgency of the matter, whether the claimant was asked to comment and give his side of the story, and the tone of the article. ...

The paper argued that it had a duty to publish such documents, even though it could not prove they were true.

It also claimed that its coverage was neutral - despite headlines such as "Memo from Saddam: We can't afford to pay Galloway any more" and a leading article headed "Saddam's Little Helper", which used the word "treason".

The judge, Mr Justice Eady, said Telegraph executives were deluding themselves that they were covering the story neutrally: "They did not merely adopt the allegations. They embraced them with relish and fervour. They then went on to embellish them."

He said the newspaper took no steps to verify the information nor did it raise queries or call for an investigation into the documents.

And though it had interviewed Mr Galloway over the phone, it had it not given him a chance to read the documents or have them read to him, so he was unable to make meaningful comment about them.

So the judge ruled that the Telegraph was not protected by the Reynolds defence or any other form of qualified privilege.