Philadelphia Newspapers Inc. v. Hepps

Since 1964 the Supreme Court dramatically revised common libel law. The Court regularly rejected the common law balancing between First Amendment speech protections and privacy in favor of rigidly protecting the press. This decision, further expanded in Hustler Magazine Inc. v. Falwell (1988), had far reaching implications. Even where defamatory statements are false, a private individual can rarely win damages from the media if the topic is of public interest as liberally interpreted by the courts.

The increasingly conservative social climate of the 1980s and 1990s marked an era of government placing greater responsibility on individuals and institutions to conduct themselves properly. Basic court rules applied to the press were not to knowingly print false information, to provide an open discussion on public issues, and to act with reasonable care. But still no single standard was formally established for media responsibility in telling the truth.

Due to the substantial changes in libel law introduced by the Supreme Court, many became dissatisfied with the status of libel law in general. Libel law in the 1990s provided little protection for individuals' reputations, yet left the press open to occasional large damage awards that were not overturned in appeals courts. As a result, libel cases were still considered the single largest threat in the 1990s to press freedom. The high expense of legal defense alone posed a "chilling effect" on press freedom, if not actual adverse court rulings.

Libel law reform received considerable attention beginning in the 1960s. Some argued for abolishing libel law altogether, claiming history showed private citizens rarely suffered actual damage. Public opinion would thus serve as the judge of truth rather than the courts. Proponents for revising rather than abolishing libel law claimed some form of reputation protection is important for a civilized society. Justice Potter Stewart wrote in the 1966 case of Rosenblatt v. Baer, "The right of a man to the protection of his own reputation from unjustified invasion . . . [is] our basic concept of the essential dignity and worth of every human being--a concept at the root of any decent system of ordered liberty." Legislative solutions, including the proposed Uniform Defamation Act in the early 1990s, gained little organized support. The press institution provided organized opposition despite some proposals limiting monetary damage payments. Many reform efforts attempted to replace the requirement of proving malice with a system involving public retractions or a quicker system of judging truthfulness. In the meantime, the public gained greater appreciation of the contention between press freedom and defamation worries in accepting that some false statements may receive protection from the First Amendment to safeguard "the greater marketplace of ideas."