[QUOTE=crowmanyclouds]
Soo,
(1) Cite that an American reporter writing in an American publication distributed in the UK has ever faced criminal or civil charges for their reporting.
(2) Got any cites for US LAWS? Since it’s a story about an incident in FLORIDA, published in FLORIDA.[/COLOR]
[/QUOTE]
Since I was talking about “other jurisdictions”, I thought it was pretty clear that I might actually be talking about law outside Florida, and even outside the US. I’m not an expert on US law, but I do know that the First Amendment affects a whole bunch of things, including contempt of court.
My point was in response to Garfield226’s question, “Why should a newspaper be concerned with the state’s ability to produce an ‘unbiased jury’?” I guess that can be interpreted as a question about qhat the law is, or as a question about what the law should be. I took it the second way, and pointed out that in England, Scotland, and in some other countries that have drawn on UK law, the line between the rights of newspapers/journalists to report the news and the rights of accused criminals to a fair trial has been drawn in a very different position. And, as an Australian coming from a legal system similar to the English one in this regard, I fid it hard to see how you can have an unprejudiced jury in a really high profile case (e.g., O.J. Simpson or Timothy McVeigh), because of how the media are allowed to publish prejudicial information before a jury trial.
That’s all: I wasn’t claiming that (without very strong links to a case in a court in the UK) a Florida journalist would be subject to that law of contempt of court.
[QUOTE=crowmanyclouds]
Maybe you could explain how a reporter in Florida would be subject to the rules and laws in your cite?
Got any cites for US LAWS?
CMC fnord!
[/QUOTE]
Gosh! I wonder if that’s what he was getting at when he said “in other jurisdictions”?
Soo,
(1) Cite that an American reporter writing in an American publication distributed in the UK has ever faced criminal or civil charges for their reporting.
(2) Got any cites for US LAWS? Since it’s a story about an incident in FLORIDA, published in FLORIDA.
CMC fnord!
[/QUOTE]
Gosh! I wonder if that’s what he was getting at when he said “in other jurisdictions”?
Did you miss the part where he was drawing a comparison between U.S. law and law in other places?
[QUOTE=acsenray]
From my point of view, the story is poorly written, but otherwise is a decent piece of journalism. It gives information about an actual event in the local community, one that resulted in a fatal shooting, to boot. Hell, yeah, the details are of public interest.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=acsenray]
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been interpreted to bar the government from preventing or punishing publication of any information, especially if it’s truthful. Specifically, “prior restraint” is banned. That is, the government can’t tell someone not to publish something. There are, in theory, some situations that are so dire that prior restraint might be contemplable, but an ordinary criminal proceeding is definitely not one of them.
[/QUOTE]
Nevertheless there is a difference between what a journalist can do legally/constitutionally and what most journalists feel they can do within the constraints of the ethics and professional standards of their profession/employer.
Most media outlets have as policy the non-publishing of the names of rape victims. Most media outlets also generally cooperate with law enforcement within reason. And if there’s a detail of a case that a journalist might no, but withholding it furthers an ongoing criminal investigation, and if the information isn’t essentially to getting the news out, most media outlets will also withhold said information.
Prior restraint is also not outright “banned” by any means. Case law is fragmented on the matter, off the top of my head I cannot think of any prior restraint cases in which the government has won before the SCOTUS. I know that in the Pentagon Papers case the government lost, and was not permitted to maintain an injunction on publication of the classified documents. However, in that particular decision a majority of the justices did concur that in some cases prior restraint could be justified (just not in that particular case.)
[QUOTE=ShibbOleth]
The fine people of Pensacola / Escambia County would be tickled to find themselves referred to as Yanks.
[/QUOTE]
As with other things, the meaning of the word “Yanks” changes when you leave the United States. In other English-speaking countries, it’s not limited to people coming from states north of the Mason-Dixon Line, or even states East of the Hudson River.