Communication 273
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Memo to the class:
Alton was established by French fur traders in a place that much later became Madison County. Four miles south is the great junction of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. From this meeting of the waters, Lewis and Clark set off on their exploration of the trans-Mississippi west. Here in 1837, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, the abolitionist preacher and publisher, became America's first journalist martyr when a pro-slavery threw his presses into the river and then murdered him. Here in 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held the last of their famous debates about slavery. And here for more than 150 years was published a newspaper called the Alton Telegraph. By 1980, the paper had a circulation of some 38,000. It was family-owned and proud. Not many papers could say that Abraham Lincoln had appeared in local news articles. Our story begins with a prominent apartment developer named James C. Green. As a big-time builder, he needed a large and ready line of credit. In the late 1960s, Green's activities and the rumors around them came to the attention of two investigative reporters for the Telegraph. They were looking into possible Mafia connections in Madison County. A federal anti-crime strike force had been formed, and it also was investigating. The reporters developed information that mob money was being funneled into the Piasa First Savings and Loan Association, which in turn was lending money to Green. The reporters surmised that Green was involved with the Mafia. That might explain the mob's investments in Piasa. The money lent by the S&L to Green could be illegal kickbacks, in which case he was a racketeer. The reporters got some leads from the sheriff's office and elsewhere but the investigation bogged down. So in 1969, they wrote a confidential memorandum to the federal strike force, alleging that Mafia money was going into Piasa. In the memo, they accused Green by name of receiving kickbacks and said he was associated with "hoods." The reporters asserted that Green had a silent partner who was "the No. 2 crime boss in the county." The reporters asked the strike force to verify this information. It was explosive stuff. The trouble was, nothing came of it. The reporters' work eventually ran into a dead end. They could find no wrongdoing by Green or Piasa. The tip to the feds produced nothing. There was no story. The paper did not publish anything. The project went onto hibernation. But if the journalists came up empty handed, the roof was falling in on James C. Green. His financing dried up. His contracting business failed. He found himself financially destroyed and he did not know why. This mega-developer, who had put up 2,500 apartment units, now worked as a common carpenter. What had happened was this. Though the federal strike force decided against a criminal investigation of Green, it nonetheless sent the details of the reporters' memo to the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. That agency began questioning Piasa about Green. As a result, Piasa cut off its loans to the developer. Then in 1975, one of the reporters, still curious as to what had happened with that old tip they had sent the feds, gave a copy of the memo to a former head of Piasa. He thought it was interesting enough to share with James C. Green. For Green, the memo explained everything. At last he knew how and why and by whom he had been ruined. So he sued the Alton Telegraph for libel. The paper argued that it had never actually printed the damaging material. The threat of libel, it said, would diminish news organizations' ability to do investigations and deter citizens from giving information to law enforcement officials. Green's lawyer scoffed at this. Press freedom wasn't the issue, he said. Instead, the suit was about two lazy reporters who wanted the government to do their work for them and ruined an innocent man in the process. The First Amendment was no more pertinent, he said, than it would be if the newspaper's delivery truck had hit a small boy, paralyzing the child and resulting in a large judgment against it. In July 1980, the jury returned the largest libel verdict up to then in American history. With actual and punitive damages, it amounted to $9.2 million. At the time, the paper's net worth was $2.5 million. The verdict was a bombshell for the press. Unable to bear the costs of an appeal, the venerable Telegraph filed for bankruptcy. The nightmare of the Alton Telegraph is that libel suits can be filed and won for material that never appears in the paper or on the air. Simply a note, a memorandum will do. It's true that no higher court ever ruled on this case. Nonetheless, it surely has potential to be cited as precedent and that potential extends into our classroom and its Web site. Libel laws may differ a bit here and there, but the California statute states the situation clearly: "Libel is false publication by writing, printing, picture, effigy or other fixed representation to the eye, which exposes any person to hatred, contempt, ridicule, or obloquy, or which causes him to be shunned or avoided, or which has a tendency to injury him in his occupation." For purposes of libel, publication is defined as the dissemination of the offending material to as few as three persons. The Telegraph case is pertinent to you and your work. Every one of you is doing news writing for this class. You are all out there gathering news and writing it -- interviewing, taking notes at meetings, reading print or electronic documents and the rest. Your work is "published" on our Web site and each of your stories is read by more than three people. If what you write is false and injurious or defamatory, if what you write subjects someone to hatred, contempt or ridicule, it certainly has a wide enough audience through our Web site to qualify it as "published" and hence potentially be libelous. Now I have checked with counsel on this. In general, you do not have much to worry about -- even as other students in college classrooms do not have much to worry about when it comes to the outside world and its complaints about the work of the academy. But for that matter, professional journalists should not have much to worry about; and yet every day someone gets in trouble. If you'd like to hear about them, I'll tell you some stories of reporters who wound up on the wrong side of libel suits just by failing to pay attention to fundamentals. There is no absolute academic or classroom privilege that protects what you write from the laws of damage and libel. If you write, falsely, that someone is a liar, an adulterer, a child molester, a dope field or a mobster, and it turns out that he or she is none of the above, there may be problems. The claim of academic freedom to protect what we do is a powerful one. So is the tradition of the classroom and its sanctity. The fact that what we do is intended for academic purposes and that we have no intention to spread or profit from the information should be a sturdy defense. But, as I said, it's not absolute -- and for that I'm glad. The constraints that apply to everyday journalists ought to be observed in our work. I think that our standards should be as high as that of any news organization. Students should enjoy no moratorium on accuracy or decency. What does that mean for us? It means that before you write, you will have verified your information. It means you will treat your subjects and sources fairly, giving them opportunity to respond to accusations and criticism. It means that you will not knowingly present that which is not true as that which is. It means that you will acknowledge mistakes in your stories. Most of all, it means you will understand that though journalists have vast power to do good, they also have the capacity to harm people and that you will not engage in cheap shots for the sheer thrill of it. Not now, not ever. We are just a small journalism class, one of hundreds in the United States. But I want you to treat your work with the same care, the same concern for quality, the same respect for the abiding values and principles of our craft as if you worked for the finest paper on earth. That's what we're about, you and I. Now go out and do great things. Regards, Bill Woo |