Not So Private Lives

To people whose private lives have been rudely invaded by the press or radio, journalism is simply bad taste in print or wired for sound. Can they do anything about it? Not much, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last week. The court upheld dismissal of the suit of two sisters who had sued a Tuscaloosa radio station for digging up a story about their father's disappearance in 1905. "The right of privacy is supported by logic and the weight of authority," said the court, but in the face of "legitimate public interest" it has to give way.

What news isn't of "legitimate public interest"? No newsman could give a final answer. The New York Times is decently mum on many a scandal that the hard-eyed New York Daily News delights to mock and maul. In the current American Mercury, Chicago Lawyer Mitchell Dawson tries to fix the legal boundary between privacy and the press. Actually, says he, the right of privacy is neither ancient nor inalienable. It was formulated no longer ago than 1890, by Louis Brandeis, later Supreme Court Justice, and his law partner, Samuel D. Warren, in a magazine article prompted by the rise of yellow journalism. Brandeis and Warren suggested that the courts should award damages, or injunctions, against press gossips who violated "the right of each of us to keep his private life private."

That doctrine, wrote Dawson, "did not catch on very well. It ran smack up against a more powerful force--the right of the public to the free flow of news." Since then, twelve states have held "that a mari is entitled to redress for the unauthorized appropriation of his name or picture for trade purposes. But . . . the publication of news is not a trade purpose. No one can stop the use of his name or photograph if they are matters of public interest, no matter how much it hurts him."

Dawson cited the case of William James Sidis, the ex-child prodigy who sued the New Yorker for rediscovering him in his clerkly obscurity with ', "Where Are They Now?" piece. The court granted that Sidis' privacy had been invaded--but threw out the case because, as Sidis had been a person in the public eye, the story still "possesses great reader interest."

"Legal restraints," wrote Lawyer Dawson, "will never stop newsmen from supplying what they think the public wants, as long as we still have freedom of the press. Restraints, to be effective, must be imposed by the gentlemen of the press and radio themselves." A man's only hope of exercising his right of privacy--is "to live a happy humdrum life and stay out of the way of newsmen."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.