Professor Michael Turney, Ph.D.
Communication Department

Note:

This course is cross-listed as JOU 385, which is a requirement for journalism and radio/tv majors and minors, and as PSC 394, which is an elective political science course.

Course concept
and content

Law of Mass Communication focuses on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the impact its constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and freedom of the press have on Americans’ other individual and societal rights. It addresses personal, political, and philosophical issues related to the First Amendment and explores the complex balance of legal issues and rights involved in the operation of American mass media and in everyday interpersonal communication.

Topics include the roles of law and mass media in society, media licensing and taxation, the public's right to know, philosophical and practical tensions between government and mass media, freedom of expression vs. censorship,, invasion of privacy by the media, reputation and defamation, pornography and obscenity, and copyright.

Conceptually, the course should enhance students' understanding of the U.S. legal system and constitutional law affecting communication. Practically, it should alert them to the legal minefields inherent in professional communication and help them avoid legal pitfalls when communicating.

Course objectives

After successfully completing this course students should be able to:

• explain how the adversarial legal system in the United States and its reliance on case law continually refine and re-define the legality of various behaviors and constitutional rights;

• discuss how the constitutional principles of personal freedom of speech and freedom of the press are interpreted and applied to mass media operations;

• identify other personal and constitutional rights which can conflict with First Amendment rights and explain how these rights are balanced against one another;

• summarize the evolution and importance of major communication law concepts such as defamation, copyright, invasion of privacy, prior restraint, and licensing;

• analyze situations to determine which principles of communication law apply and to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of opposing legal arguments;

• reduce their risk of liability while communicating by recognizing potential trouble and knowing how to avoid or minimize it.

Textbook

The Law of Public Communication (2002 edition)
by Kent R. Middleton, Robert Trager, and Bill F. Chamberlin
Addison Wesley Longman: New York.

or

The Law of Public Communication (2003 edition)
by Kent R. Middleton, William Less, and Bill F. Chamberlin
Addison Wesley Longman: New York.

Exams

There are three exams, each of the same magnitude and evenly spaced throughout the semester. They emphasize explanation and interpretation rather than memorization of discrete facts. All of the questions on the exams require full-sentence, expository answers rather than blackened circles on a machine-graded answer sheet. Some questions call for a 3-5 sentence short answer synthesizing lecture/text material, while others require students to write 1-3 pages in a blue test book explaining/analyzing an actual or hypothetical situation. Although students are expected to understand and apply many basic legal concepts that span the entire semester, the primary focus of each exam is new material that has been assigned and covered since the last exam. Combined, the three exams account for 50 percent of the final course grade.

Assignments

Case analyses are 3-5 page papers in which students apply principles of law and precedents from previous court decisions to new, hypothetical situations which involve a conflict of rights or a possible prosecution or lawsuit. They require legal research, usually in the Chase Law Library and/or on the Internet, as well as thoughtful integration of concepts and ideas from class meetings and from the textbook. Students are assigned two case analyses which they can complete alone or working a partner. For one case, they will advise the complainant or injured party, and in the other case they will advise the respondent. In both cases, the analysis should conclude by recommending how the advisee should proceed in dealing with the situation.

Feedback assignments are short, often spontaneous exercises intended to promote attendance and active participation in class. There may be one or more per week, about 12-15 for the semester, depending on circumstances that arise. They may ask for comments on reading assignments, require looking up and reporting about local statutes, assessing a current news story with legal ramifications, or evaluating the likely outcome of an actual or hypothetical case. Although some feedback assignments, e.g., looking up statutes, are done outside of class, most are completed in class and arise spontaneously without advance warning. Instead of being individually letter-graded, feedback assignments earn variable numbers of points for acceptable completion. These points accumulate from assignment to assignment and are coverted to a single letter-grade at the end of the semester.

Contractual C
option

Since earning a high grade requires more than average effort and high quality work, and some students prefer to do less work and settle for earning a grade of C, the contractual C option has been designed to accommodate them. Students who choose to sign a Contractual C Agreement are excused from doing both case analyses in exchange for agreeing to limit their final course grades to C or lower. Their final course grades are based solely on the weighted average of their three exam grades and their feedback grades with the stipulation that their final grades may be no higher than C.