Cox Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn

The crux of the arguments presented by Cox Broadcasting's attorneys involved the right to make the details of criminal proceedings known to the public. It was, of course, permissible for the press to report on just such government proceedings--in the 1947 Craig v. Harney decision, Justice William O. Douglas wrote in his opinion that "a trial is a public event. What transpires in the court room is public property." Wassell had learned Cohn's name when inspecting the indictment at the trial court for his story. The indictment was part of the public record, and because it was a public document it was indeed information that any citizen might obtain by going to the prosecutor's offices and requesting to inspect it.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court--as with many of the judicial bodies in the United States--usually backed away from restricting the freedom of the press in cases not involving libel. The First Amendment, guaranteeing news organizations the right to report on matters of public interest without fear of censorship, was a near-sacrosanct element of the democratic traditions of the United States. According to some legal analysts, to restrict or otherwise punish the media for reporting truthful information (as the Georgia statute did) would incur what was called the "chilling effect." This referred to self-censorship or journalistic timidity should any legal constraint bind the media. This, in turn, would diminish the press's crucial role in a democratic society as a disseminator of information.