PRIVACY ISSUES IN JOURNALISM IN THE 1990S ABSTR

For most of the 20th century, certainly through the 1960s, the civil tort of invasion of privacy in various forms expanded the liability of the media under state law. Thereafter, under various constitutional decisions of the Supreme Court expanding the scope of the First Amendment guarantees of a free press, the media enjoyed considerable freedom to investigate and report and/or broadcast events as they saw fit, subject to the continued vitality of certain limitations relating to the protection of personal privacy under state tort law which continued to operate within the penumbra of federal First Amendment jurisprudence.

During the 1990s, some federal and state courts tightened restrictions against particularly egregious invasions of privacy in response to growing public concern that the media may have been accorded too much latitude, notwithstanding their preferred constitutional status under the First Amendment.

Scope of Topic. This research paper deals with the principal legal issues faced by the communications industry or mass media in the 1990s in relation to privacy concerns --i.e. risks of civil law suits for invasions of privacy arising out of newsgathering, news reporting and broadcasting activities.

The focus of this article is on the restrictions placed by state tort law, as modified by federal constitutional (First Amendment) law, on the media's journalistic activities. Outside the sc

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e publicized matter or have acted with reckless disregard of its falsity. One of the early cases, Spahn v. Messner, 286 N.Y.S.2d 832 (N.Y. 1967) illustrated that not all false light cases involved defamation. Warren Spahn, a former major league baseball pitcher, was falsely depicted in a children's book as a war hero which arguably raised not lowered his reputation. In the Time, Inc. v. Hill case mentioned above, the plaintiffs, the Hill family who had been held hostage by criminals, sued for their portrayal in a false light by Life. The Supreme Court dismissed the case by adopting at 387-388 a very broad standard for when a publication dealt with "matters of public interest." In other cases, such as Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U.S. 323 (1974), and Cantrell v. Forest City Publishing Co., 415 U.S. 254 (1975), the Supreme Court imported into false light privacy cases a requirement from defamation cases such as New York Times v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), that in cases involving public figures or where public events were involved no privacy action would lie unless actual malice could be shown. According to Ghormley, the tort of privacy generally began a downward spiral after the Hill case; and the "false light privacy
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Approximate Word count = 4433
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)