"You may not have heard it, but the bell did ring, so seats everyone. It's time to start another day! Today, we'll be learning about a topic that people struggle with; what is defamation, and what are the differences with it, libel and slander?"
"To start, I'll give an example of something people would say falls under one of those. Principle Asano is a crude man who doesn't value students. Now I'm sure there are those among you already nodding your heads internally, but let's be patient for the lesson."
"We'll start with the most basic part. This is, indeed, defamation. While his methods stand in opposition of my own, he does what he thinks is best for the students. Take when he showed up with Takaoka. While he has no love for those in Class E, he considered Takaoka's presence the wrong way to deal with students. So now the question is 'does that mean it's not libel or slander?'"
"Ahuhuhu~ If you fell into such a trap already, you might need to work on your deduction skills."
"While I mentioned it was defamation, I said it was something people would say fall under one of them. Defamation here plays the same role as the word 'book', in that it's both an umbrella term and a catch-all. When you talk about books, people assume you mean soft-cover, hard-cover, self-published, picture, and many other things. When you are talking about books, you need not specify what kind of book. Anything that is libel or slander is defamation, but not all defamation is one of them."
"So, if defamation is to catch everything that isn't libel or slander, then what about what I said? Well, it would be slander as it's what I've said. If I were to write it down, and pass it around, it would be considered libel. That's really the big difference between them; the medium. If you want to get technical libel does require it to be published, but in the age of information is there any real difference between a newspaper publishing to tens of thousands in a city, and sending a post into the internet to be read by an unknown amount of people? The lines between the two have been even further blurred by how people treat things on the internet, but that's for a different lesson."
"So the take away from this lesson is that while there is a difference between the three, the difference for most people is semantics at best. Now, if you were to go to a court for one of these, their version is likely to be way more precise and important but I'm just a Junior High teacher, not a lawyer. Please don't try and use this lesson in courts."
