Public Invasion I Just Wanna Look At Your Ass 2

Do not let your opinion about whether someone is a public figure or official color your decision to verify the accuracy of a story. Juries do not respond favorably to reporters who fail to confront their subjects with defamatory information and provide them with an opportunity to comment.

Publication of truthful information concerning the private life of a person that would be both highly offensive to a reasonable person and not of legitimate public interest is an invasion of privacy in some states. Liability often is determined by how the information was obtained and its newsworthiness, and varies from community to community, as offensiveness is a jury question.

Although relatively few courts have found publication of private information sufficiently offensive and sufficiently lacking in newsworthiness to impose liability on the media, there are instances when they may be liable for invasion of privacy based on the highly offensive public disclosure of private facts.

Truth can be a defense, but only in false light cases. A litigant claiming false light invasion of privacy who is involved in a matter of public interest must prove that the media intentionally or recklessly made erroneous statements about him. However, truth is not a defense to a claim based on publication of private facts.

If the public has a legitimate interest in the story as it was reported, newsworthiness can be a defense to the charge of invasion of privacy. But if the report of legitimate public interest includes gratuitous private information, publication of those private facts may be actionable.

If you are threatened with prosecution under a statute that supposedly makes publication of the information a crime, ask to see the statute or get enough information so that you can obtain a copy of it yourself. If such a law exists and covers the kind of information you want to publish, consult an attorney about the constitutionality of the law or call the Reporters Committee. Make a reasoned decision about publication only after you and your editors have considered the legal ramifications of that decision.

Regardless of what judges call them or who initiates them, gag orders interfere with your efforts to gather and disseminate news. Orders prohibiting participants in a case from commenting to reporters or the public also infringe on the First Amendment rights of the individuals gagged.2 At least one court has ruled gag orders on trial participants are as serious as those on the press and subject to the same strict test for constitutionality.3

But just as the media do not have rights greater than the general public, they cannot be denied access that is granted to the general public. If prisoners are allowed to add whomever they choose to their visitor lists, for example, prisons cannot stop them from including members of the news media on those lists. They may, however, forbid journalists to use cameras, recording devices and writing implements if other visitors are not allowed to use them.

You may have to pay for the copies of records you receive. A deposit also may be required before the records custodian will process a large request. Some states allow agencies to charge for the time it takes their employees to locate the documents, in addition to the actual copying costs. Under the federal law and some state laws, reporters are entitled to partial or full fee waivers, especially if their requests will directly benefit the public. The federal law entitles reporters to an automatic waiver of all search fees and the first 100 pages of copying fees. Ask for the waiver in the initial records request and list your reporting credentials to document your eligibility for the waiver. Although many statutes establish fee schedules that charge commercial requesters a higher fee, newsgathering generally is not considered to be a commercial use of the information.

If your request is denied, insist that the agency official cite the specific statutory exemption justifying the withholding. Most states require agencies to separate exempt information from non-exempt material. Therefore, you may get a document in which certain information has been blacked out. Once again, agencies must justify these deletions by referring to specific exceptions in the public records law or to some other statute. If the agency offers to release a portion of the requested information, you may accept partial access and resolve the remaining issues subsequently.

But the Marines who dueled that day and those who rooted for them would soon be sent to one of the bloodiest battles of the war, the invasion of Okinawa, where the casualty rate among the two regiments was over 50%. Bissinger's book is about the young men's lives in peace and war with insightful descriptions of the World War II experience from how service rivalries led to poor command decisions, which cost lives, to the hardships Marines endured in training, on board transport ships, and in combat zones. Buzz Bissinger's writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated and other publications. Among his other books are "A Prayer For The City," "Three Nights In August," "Shooting Stars" and "Father's Day."

The Marine would - what they would do is they would find newspaper reporters, and they would say, do you want to join the Marines and be a correspondent? And many did. They would go to boot camp. And then they were embedded. And some of the most - for that time, the footage that some of these guys took of some of the battles, first time dead bodies were shown, was both enlightening and horrific. And the purpose was to show a very laissez faire American public just what was going on because I think in many ways the Pacific War just was forgotten in the shadow of the Atlantic.

BISSINGER: ...To men fighting in the Pacific. But the point to me was they loved it. This was the last time that I think they were allowed to be boys. They were allowed to be boys doing something they loved, and they loved football. Because three months later, they were at Okinawa about to participate in something they couldn't have possibly imagined. They were men again. And it struck me - they were boys. I look at their pictures. I've a picture of Dave Schreiner next to me as I wrote. And this isn't just set here. I would look into it. He was a boy. He had so much life ahead of him. And to know what happened to him, to know what happened to others, it's such a tragedy.

BISSINGER: And the Japanese, they were obviously on shore on Okinawa. And they looked through their binoculars, and they called it the typhoon of steel. And when you see pictures, it's amazing the Japanese just didn't say, all right, that's it; we're going home. And they certainly did not. So you had that. The American forces combat was about 180,000. But there would be obviously other people there to work the ammo dumps and the supply dumps and things like that. So probably, the actual size of the force was about 500,000. And, you know, they figured the Japanese are going to be tough. They're always tough. They've gotten better as the war has progressed. But we're going to get them. We outman them. We outman them. We out-plane them. They had no planes left, and they had no ships. But the Japanese were brilliant strategically.

BISSINGER: Yes. Buckner was an Army general. But he was an Army guy. And there was an Army unit, the 27th, that got decimated. And finally, Buckner made a concession - bring in the Marines, which I don't think he wanted to do. They were up north. There was no opposition north. So here are the Marines. We're done. We're going to go back to Guam and party and cases of beer. And then the word comes in, no, you're going south. You're going south. And they were pissed. And there's this wonderful moment in the book - they're on a small road. They're going south. The Army's going north. And all sorts of epithets - you know, I won't repeat them, but, you know, we're saving your ass once again, and you're putting us into harm's way. And we're not going to forget it. And they both - it just amplified the hate between the two. And so the Marines went south into chaos and hell and blood and death.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 also raises more specific interpretive difficulties. The Ordinance only protected those contracts in place before the law went into effect, which was adopted for the Contracts Clause in Ogden v. Saunders (1827) over the dissents of both Justices Marshall and Story. The issue bristles with difficulties. One powerful objection to the Marshall/Story position is that it flies in the face of hundreds of years of legal history by refusing to give credit to statutes of limitations, recordation statutes, and the statute of frauds, all of which necessarily impair certain contracts that lack the requisite formalities in order to increase the security of exchange overall. But it hardly follows that the prospective reading of the Contracts Clause has to be rejected in order to accommodate these common-sense cases. In this regard, it is instructive to compare the Contracts Clause with the Takings Clause, where the latter allows for the taking of property for public use on payment of just compensation. Why not therefore read a just compensation exception into the Contracts Clause?

That position is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In West River Bridge Co. v. Dix (1848) the question was whether the United States could condemn a bridge that had been authorized by government charter. It had earlier been held that the Contracts Clause applied to government charters in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, (1819), in which New Hampshire simply sought to take over Dartmouth College, causing harm that could not be easily cured by paying compensation. But in Dix, it would have been absurd to say that no state could ever condemn any property for public use on payment of just compensation whenever that property had been acquired by contract, either from the state or from some private party. Hence the Court read in a just compensation exception that brought the Contracts Clause closer to the Takings Clause, again by a process of textual implication. 2b1af7f3a8