LOS ANGELES, Oct. 4 — A state appeals court has upheld the dismissal of a $24-million libel suit against a reporter who spent 46 days in jail for refusing to reveal his source for a story on the Manson Family murder trial.

The state Court of Appeal upheld a lower court ruling that attorneys Irving Kanarek and Paul Fitzgerald were to blame for the failure to bring the libel case to trial within five years. The attorneys had asserted they could not file suit within the five-year statute of limitations because of lengthy appeals in the case.

The lawyers charged in the suit filed in 1973 that they were libeled in 1969 when Bill Farr, then a reporter with The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, defied a gag order and published information obtained from a transcript of a witness’ testimony.

Farr refused to tell Superior Court Judge Charles Older who had given him the document, but said it had come from two of the six attorneys in the case.

The reporter, since hired by The Los Angeles Times, was found in contempt of court and jailed from November 1972 to January 1973, The contempt case against Farr ended In 1976 when the appeals court ruled that further Incarceration would be punitive.

The suit filed by Kanarek and Fitzgerald, both defense attorneys in the Manson trial, charged that Farr libeled them by not identifying his sources. They said his steadfast refusal to name the attorneys led to speculation that either or both of them were responsible and damaged their professional reputations.

Superior Court Judge Robert Well, who dismissed the suit in 1979, ruled earlier that Farr’s refusal to deny that Kanarek and Fitzgerald were the attorneys involved established for the record that they were not.

Charles Manson and several of his followers were convicted in 1970 of the August 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and six other persons during a two-night rampage.

They were all sentenced to die in the gas chamber, but later received life sentences after California’s old death penalty law was revoked. None of the Manson Family members convicted of the slayings has yet received a parole date.