Word: lawfulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most journalists would not yet agree with Allen Neuharth, head of the Gannett newspaper chain, that in this respect, the Supreme Court has moved "above the law." But the trend is clear and alarming, from the denial of confidentiality of sources to surprise newsroom searches (see LAW). Not only the press is affected. The search decision can send the cops into psychiatrists' or lawyers' offices as well. The latest court ruling that pretrial hearings and possibly trials themselves may be closed to press and public is reprehensible, among other reasons because it could lead to collusion-behind closed...
...monstrous regiment of lawyers has rarely been more resented. In a recent Harris poll about public confidence in various institutions, law firms ranked eleventh on a list of 13. Even when lawyers are miraculously transformed into judges, they do not regain total trust. In the same poll, the Supreme Court came in sixth, while TV news (somewhat surprisingly) ranked first and the press in general ranked fifth, thus nosing ahead of the august court...
...Washington came to believe that the press should be firmly "managed" and kept in its place. Jefferson, kinder to the press than to the courts, disagreed and declared grandiosely that "nature has given to man no other means [than the press] of sifting out the truth either in religion, law, or politics." (In fairness, it should be noted that later he declared himself "infinitely happier" once he had stopped all his newspaper subscriptions...
...infinitely expanded by electronics, has come a long way since those days. Yet, the public, despite its daily if not hourly intimacy with the press, does not really understand it very well. That lack of understanding is reflected in the courts, although it goes far beyond matters of the law. In part, this is inevitable because the press is indeed a peculiar institution, full of paradoxes. To understand and judge -even to criticize it for the right reasons-a few broad points might be kept in mind...
...Ober believes had a block against rewriting: "As a doctor, Williams may have buried his mistakes; as a poet, he published them." On the importance of wit and libertinism at the court of Charles II: "Men rose by their levity and women by their willingness to comply with the law of gravity, shortly to be discovered...