And now for some slightly late homework assignments, thanks to my pain-in-the-butt blog.
For our textbook exercise, we were posed this question:
You are on an assignment with your photographer, who enters a house without permission and photographs the sale of illegal drugs. Discuss the issues raised by the circumstances and explain why you would or would not publish the pictures.
The most obvious reason why these photographs should not be printed is that they were obtained through trespassing -- entering private property without the permission of the owner. Trespassing is never justified, even if the picture would be newsworthy.
I'd also avoid printing the photographs because of the four categories of defamation. If the photograph was printed, it might be taken as "accusing someone of a crime," "damaging a person in his or her public office, profession, or occupation," or "accusing a person of serious immorality." The text exercise doesn't give detail about the people in the photograph, but it would be easy to avoid any of these problems but simply not printing it.
Dr. Jerz also asked us to find a recent article on "media law." Considering my obsession with all things film-related, it was only natural to focus on the latest happenings in the Roman Polanski libel suit.
Polanski has decided to postpone his libel suit against Conde Nast, the publishers of Vanity Fair magazine, "which claimed he attempted to seduce a young Swedish woman two days after the infamous 1969 murder of his wife Sharon Tate by the Manson family" in a July 2002 issue.
Polanski filed the suit in the UK, where libel laws are less strict. Yet due to his standing jail sentence from 1977 for statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl, he is unable to attend court, where the US/UK extradation treaties bar him.
Now, Polanski's suit has been postponed, and I can't help but wonder if he would have better luck bringing charges against the publishers if he didn't have previous trouble with the law. Something tells me that bias is coming up against Polanski, preventing him from getting a fair trial on an issue that is completely different from the subject of his 1977 experience.