"Internet Free Speech"
February 1999
The Internet tops this month's media news, but television and movies were hot topics, too.
In an important Internet free speech decision, a federal jury in Oregon awarded $107 million to a coalition of pro-choice doctors and two Portland-area abortion clinics who had sued the creators of an anti-choice Web site that, they claimed, was an incitement to murder.
Known as the Nuremberg Files, after the post-World War II war crimes trials of members of Hitler's Nazi Party, the site lists the names of thirteen doctors who provide abortions (it called them "baby butchers"). It provided the doctors' home addresses, photographs and names of their spouses and children as well as the locations of the children attend school.
When a doctor is killed, as have been several in the last few years, his
or her name is crossed out. If the doctor is only wounded, the
name is simply shaded. The site never explicitly calls for
harm to the doctors and their families, but, the plaintiffs claim the threat was quite
clear. Said one of the plaintiffs, Lois Backus, "They deliberately released [this
information] into an extremely volatile environment in which five people had been
murdered. From our perspective, this was not a First Amendment case."
But many observers, even those hostile to violent anti-choice groups, saw otherwise. The First Amendment protects speech we don't like, not just that which we do. But should the Internet, with its great reach and the anonymity it provides its users, be held to a different standard? Spokespeople for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (our site of the month) predict that, because judges tend to afford expression fuller protection than do juries, the decision will probably not stand.
NATPE-National Association of Television Programming Executives
The big news in television was not George Clooney's announcement that he was finally leaving E.R. Instead it was the annual NATPE syndicated programming market. As usual, billions of dollars worth of off-network and original programming was sold to local stations.
But the big news was the announcement by the Sinclair station group that rather than buying shows for its stations, it wanted distributors to pay it, Sinclair, for the right to air their programming.
Sinclair owns or manages 55 stations in small and medium-sized markets. Its argument was simple, "In exchange for giving syndicators premium clearances in 21% of the country, we think it's appropriate that we get more than a 50-50 split" of advertising time, said a Sinclair vice president. Broadcasting & Cable has extensive commentary and reportage of this turn of events, one that promises to reshape the business of television.
1998's Worldwide
Top Grossing Films
In movies, Variety posted its official compilation of
1998 worldwide top grosses. The Top Ten are provided below. The top grossing foreign film
was "The Full Monty" at Number 40, raking in
$83 million. The big surprise was "There's Something About
Mary", at Number 6, making Fox $328 million.
(Listings are as follows: film, releasing company, and gross domestic box office receipts.
This list last updated on January 11, 1999.) * denotes gross does not include 1997
figures; + indicates film is in current release.
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