Word: legalism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Part of the reason is practical: a news organization that breaks a confidence may find it more difficult to get information in the future. "Often the only way to get that sort of account is to promise anonymity," says one upset Newsweek Washington correspondent. There is also a legal reason: judges may be more likely to force a news organization to reveal a source if in the past it has made such disclosures voluntarily. "If a judge knows that a particular institution has been less than consistent, he could be influenced by that prior practice," says James Goodale...
...falsely claimed that Archer had purchased the services of a London prostitute. Last week the jury of eight men and four women wrote a happy ending for the novelist. After deliberating for less than four hours, they found in Archer's favor, awarding him $800,000 in damages plus legal ^ costs, which are expected to run to $1.2 million. The award was the highest ever granted in a British libel case...
Behind the accumulated chaos was a helter-skelter organization run by an insecure, often dictatorial man who, in the words of a former PTL executive, "didn't know how to balance his own checkbook." Executive turnover was constant. PTL repeatedly switched legal advisers and accounting firms. Under Bakker, PTL at one point had 47 bank accounts and 17 vice presidents, with financial control split into four separate departments. Thus no one except Bakker and his closest aides had an overall view of the ministry and its money...
...Swaggart organization has been involved in several convoluted legal disputes. Among the charges leveled against Swaggart over the years, the most serious was a 1983 accusation that contributions to a children's aid fund went for other purposes. The operation was undoubtedly sloppy, since money raised went into the general fund, and only after 1984 did the outflow of children's aid match the $21.8 million in donations...
...last there was something tangible that the American mind knew how to address: an apparent legal transgression, a scandal involving the misuse of money. The diversion became a diversion of its own, distracting attention from the thornier basic issues involved. The messy, demanding job of weighing a policy -- several policies, really -- and passing judgment gave way to the tidier task of searching for a smoking gun. There was even a ready-made framework from an earlier, dissimilar, scandal: What did the President know...