Hanson, Mass Communication 8e
SAGE Publishing, 2022
Lecture Notes
Chapter 14: Media Law: Free Speech and Fairness
Learning Objectives
1-1 Explain why the First Amendment is an essential component of a representative democracy
1-2 Identify and describe the three elements needed for a statement to be considered libelous
1-4 Explain the exception to the general rule that the First Amendment must be upheld
during open media coverage of trials
1-6 Describe how Creative Commons got its start and explain how it works as an alternative
set of copyright licenses
Annotated Chapter Outline
I. The Development of a Free Press
A. The First Amendment and the freedom of expression
B. The Roots of American Free Speech
i. Restrictions on speech in the American colonies
ii. New York Journal and the Zengers
C. Limits on Free Speech
i. Alien and Sedition Acts: laws that punished anyone who published “false,
scandalous, or malicious writings against the government of the United States, or
either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United
States” with substantial fines, jail time, or deportation
ii. Passage of the Smith Act in 1940
iii. The Post-9/11 Era
a. Passage of the USA PATRIOT Act
a. Increased domestic surveillance and widened the definition of
what constitutes terrorism
b. Most controversial: anyone served with a PATRIOT Act warrant lost
II. Libel and Protection of Individuals
A. Individual rights to protect themselves from being harmed by the media
Hanson, Mass Communication 8e
SAGE Publishing, 2022
i. Suing the press for damage
ii. Three main issues: libel, invasion of privacy, and the right to a fair trial
B. Libel: any published statement that unjustifiably exposes someone to ridicule or
contempt
i. Three elements
a. Defamation: damaging a person’s reputation in some way
C. Truth, Privilege, and Opinion
i. Truth as an absolute defense against libel, but the truth is not always clear
ii. Privilege: the idea that statements made in government meetings, in court, or in
government documents cannot be used as the basis for a libel suit
iii. Opinions are neither true or false and so cannot be used as a basis of a libel suit
D. New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
i. Civil rights ad and the Montgomery police department
E. Libel and Public Figures
i. Extension of the actual malice standard to public figures
ii. Gertz v. Robert Welch Inc
F. Libel and Social Media
i. Differences in the standard for libel between legacy media and social media
a. Legacy media have a legal staff to advise writers
b. Easier to publish defamatory content on social media
G. Recent Libel Cases
III. Invasion of Privacy
A. Privacy in the information age
B. Legal protection for four types of invasion of privacy
i. Intrusion: invasion of privacy by physical trespass into a space surrounding a
person’s body or onto property under his or her control
a. Undercover reporting
ii. Embarrassment: true information that is so embarrassing and private that a
person has reason to expect that it will not be published, especially if the person
is not well known
SAGE Publishing, 2022
iii. False light: occurs when a journalist publishes untrue statements that alter an
C. Social Media and Privacy
i. Reasonable expectation of privacy for information only available to a select
group of people
D. Privacy and Your Smartphone
IV. Free Press/Fair Trial
A. Conflict between the right to a free press and the right to a fair trial
B. Impact of pretrial publicity on impartial jury selection
C. Sheppard v. Maxwell
D. Supreme Court suggestions for ensuring a fair trial
i. Put a gag order on participants in the trial to keep them from talking to the press
in the first place
ii. Sequester the jury
E. Timothy McVeigh trial
i. Major areas of free press/fair trial law
a. Concerns about pretrial publicity in a case that affected directly or
indirectly almost every family in the Oklahoma City area
F. Cameras in the Courtroom
i. First allowed in 1917
ii. General ban on movie and still photography in 1937
iii. 1970s and 1980s: slow allowance of televise coverage
V. Controlling the Press
A. Restrictions on speech and press
i. Bans on false advertising, libel, perjury, obscenity, reporting troop movements
B. Prior Restraint
i. Prior restraint: a judicial order that stops a media organization from publishing a
story or image
ii. Near v. Minnesota
a. Ruled that the government could engage in prior restraint only to
C. The Pentagon Papers
i. Attempted suppression of the Pentagon Papers
ii. Leakage from Daniel Ellsberg
iii. Publication from the New York Times
a. Restraining order
iv. Publication and restraining order against the Washington Post
v. Four newspapers were taken to court
a. Ruled that the newspapers could resume publication
vi. New York Times Co. v. United States
vii. Progressive case and the censoring of an article
viii. Difficulty of having prior restraint in Western democracies
D. Journalists and the Police
i. George Floyd protests
ii. Arrests of journalists covering the protests
a. Arrest of Omar Jimenez
iii. Attacks on journalists covering the protests
a. Blinding of Linda Tirado
E. Free Speech and Students
i. No similar protections for student reporters
ii. Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier ruling limited student newspapers’ speech rights
F. Obscenity
i. Obscenity: describes sexually explicit material that is legally prohibited from
being published
a. Difficult to define what kinds of materials can be considered obscene
ii. Roth v. United States
a. Three-part test
Hanson, Mass Communication 8e
SAGE Publishing, 2022
iii. Miller v. California
a. Used to ban child pornography
c. Reaffirmed local communities could set their own standards
iv. Obscenity in the Information Age
a. Both Roth and Miller assume that obscene material is being sold at a
particular location in a particular community
a. Not applicable to internet and satellite television
VI. Copyright and Regulation of the Media Industry
A. Largely unregulated print media
B. Controlled broadcast media from the beginning
C. Copyright laws
i. Copyright Term Extension Act
ii. Digital Millennium Copyright Act
iii. Creative Commons licenses
D. The Rise and Fall of Broadcast Regulation
i. Radio Act of 1912
ii. Radio Act of 1927
iii. Evolution of the Federal Communications Commission
iv. Basic tenets
a. The airwaves are licensed to broadcasters, but the broadcasters do not
v. Mandating Fairness on the Air
a. Equal time provision: requires broadcast stations to make equivalent
amounts of broadcast time available to all candidates running for public
office
b. Broadcasters are not responsible for libelous statements made in
political ads
c. Fairness doctrine: stations were required to cover controversial issues
vi. The Telecommunications Act of 1996
Hanson, Mass Communication 8e
SAGE Publishing, 2022
a. V-chip provides parental control to block content based on rating
b. Relaxation of restrictions on how many broadcast stations a particular
company can own
c. Communications Decency Act provision
a. Medium of the internet from a legal standpoint
vii. Net Neutrality
a. Net neutrality: an Internet that does not favor one application over
others; prevention of internet providers from controlling their