News Media and the Law

A fatal construction accident sparked an unusual, and ultimately unsuccessful, battle in which a newspaper attempted to gain access under the state open records laws to documents prepared as part of a civil lawsuit. The state Supreme Court, however,...

ROUNDUP News organizations in Oklahoma will be able to broadcast the Oklahoma City bombing pre-trial hearings, while the governor of New York wants to lift the state ban on cameras in the courtroom after the successful coverage of the Amadou Diallo trial....

D.C. CIRCUIT The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has changed its rules to exempt newsletter publishers, software developers and Internet website operators from its registration and licensing requirements. The commission dropped an appeal of a federal...

The state Supreme Court rated that an internal memorandum outlining the reasons why a city should fire its finance director was a public record under the Public Information Act, but it split on the reason why. In apparent contradiction to the plain language...

SECOND CIRCUIT A magazine that used photographs of a young model to illustrate a discussion about teen drinking and sex did not violate the model's privacy rights under New York law, the state's high court ruled in mid-February. The court's decision...

FIRST CIRCUIT Producers of "Dateline NBC" can be liable for misrepresentation when they make specific promises concerning events within their control, such as whether a certain advocacy group will be included in a story, but not for more general claims,...

ANALYSIS Journalists seeking to protect the identities of their confidential sources need to know about the possibilities of inadvertently waiving their privilege. Journalists are eyewitnesses to history. Because of their proximity to news events and...

Journalists continue to face demands for newsgathering material and news sources, as several unusual incidents in recent months show. A California editor was jailed for five days for refusing to name his source, subpoenas for five years of materials...

A city's legal bil Is are public records not covered by attorney-client privilege, a unanimous state Supreme Court ruled in late January. Fighting a request from a Kansas City Star reporter, the city of Overland Park had claimed that the disclosure of...

ROUNDUP Low-power radio stations continue to generate controversy. While those "pirate" broadcasters who have gone to court to argue their right to broadcast have been turned away, the Federal Communications Commission has developed plans to license...

SECOND CIRCUIT A magazine that used photographs of a young model to illustrate a discussion about teen drinking and sex did not violate the model's privacy rights under New York law, the state's high court ruled in mid-February. The court's decision...

Reporters faced arrest and even assault charges while covering recent protests in Miami and Washington, D.C., while another reporter was arrested in Arkansas in a dispute over public records. A reporter for an American government news service was arrested...

It started as a straightforward call to the Reporters Committee from a Lubbock, Texas, newspaper reporter for comment for a story: Was it unusual that a federal judge routinely issued gag orders in nearly every case that came before him - a total of...