Abigail Shimniok

The purpose of freedom of the press is to hold people accountable publically for their actions without having influence from any governing body.
According to Share America, “Information supplied by journalists helps citizens make informed decisions on a host of issues, from local school funding to food and drug safety, and of course, which candidate to vote for.”
Although this is constitutional right, there are exceptions to this that could cause parties to sue newspaper organizations. Libel is when a “false and defamatory statement about an identifiable person is published to a third party, causing injury to the subject’s reputation.”
This process is hard to prove, because the plaintiff has to provide concrete evidence that a newspaper published information out of malice or that they knew it was untrue.
In the Supreme Court case, New York Times Company v. Sullivan (1964), during the Civil Rights era, the New York Times was sued for defending Martin Luther King by containing facts about the city Public Commissioner’s Office that were later believed to be untrue.
The majority opinion ruled in favor for the New York Times because, “when a statement concerns a public figure, the Court held, it is not enough to show that it is false for the press to be liable for libel. Instead, the target of the statement must show that it was made with knowledge of or reckless disregard for its falsity … In libel law, ‘malice’ had meant knowledge or gross recklessness rather than intent,” Oyez.org summarized.
Though this standard was slightly changed in the Supreme Court case of Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Company (1990), after Lorain Journal Company wrote in an article that a wrestling coach committed purjury after testifying in a court case. Though the newspaper won the case because “the article was a constitutionally protected opinion,” Oyez reported.
Although the decision was overruled at the Supreme Court level deeming opinions are not constitutionally protected when they are labeled as regular news where information can be proven to be true or false.
In a similar situation at UW-Milwaukee, the UWM Post had published a story in 2011 about a student government event that shared criticism that caused certain members to throw away the newspaper once it was printed. The UWM Post revealed they had video evidence of someone who threw the papers away after they took them out of the racks.
Due to the papers being thrown away, the UWM Post sued the President of the Student Association and one of the chairs of the student Senate for theft and destruction of property.
People from the Senate came forward, one being the person throwing them away because he was directed to do so from the Student Association president. It has never been released to the public if the lawsuit was settled.
The first amendment right guarantees free speech and this includes other people’s opinions, as long as they are deemed as opinion and not as fact. Any destruction behavior of a newspaper can be the subject of legal action.