Key Documents: Section I. Journalism, Media, and the Law - Libel Issues

Introduction

Journalists have always felt an obligation to hold public officials to a more intense level of scrutiny than private citizens. Besieged public officials had long tried to ward off the criticism this attention produced by filing a steady stream of libel suits against the press. The frequency of these defamation charges, and the ease with which the suits were won, elevated the importance of the decision in the 1964 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan Supreme Court case to landmark status. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. began the majority opinion by saying that for the “first time” a case would determine how much constitutional protections should “limit a State's power to award damages in a libel action brought by a public official against critics of his official conduct.”

Justice Brennan fully realized the potential impact of this case on the freedom of the press and other watchdog groups. He wrote eight drafts of his opinion in order to successfully convince initially dissenting colleagues to back a more powerful unanimous decision. The Court's ruling dramatically raised the level of proof required for a public official to win a libel suit against the press. The official could no longer triumph in a libel action by merely establishing that a journalist's statement about him had eventually been shown to be false.

Public officials now had to prove that the false statements of journalists were written or said with “actual malice” for libel to exist. This means the press had to know in advance that their comments about the officials were false or made with a “reckless disregard” as to whether they conveyed the truth. Brennan's majority opinion indicated that the actual malice standard for libel also demanded that the public official now prove that the journalist's statements were both malicious in nature and intentionally hurtful as well. Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, in a concurring opinion, suggested raising the bar even further for public servants to prove libel when he argued that the press and others be granted “an absolute, unconditional privilege to criticize official conduct despite the harm that may flow from excesses and abuses.”

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan can be traced to a 1960, full-page Times ad based on an earlier editorial that called for readers to “heed rising voices” of peaceful civil rights demonstrators in the South. The ad recounted stories of official abuse of demonstrators in Montgomery, Alabama, and Orangeburg, South Carolina. L. B. Sullivan, the Montgomery commissioner responsible for the police department, saw the ad as false in certain claims and as an unwarranted attack on him, his city, and the police. Sullivan and a number of others sued the Times in the Alabama courts and won large damage decisions based on the state civil libel laws. The Supreme Court ruling effectively overturned these state libel laws and also served to empower the press in its coverage of the civil rights struggle.

—Glenn Lewis Volume Editor

U.S. Supreme court New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964) 376 U.S.

...