Opinion ID: 303593
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Difference Between Interesting News and Important Public Issues

Text: 29 Petitioner's basic misapprehension here is a confusion of an issue over newsworthiness with a controversial issue of public importance. Merely because a story is newsworthy does not mean that it contains a controversial issue of public importance. Our daily papers and television broadcasts alike are filled with news items which good journalistic judgment would classify as newsworthy, but which the same editors would not characterize as containing important controversial public issues. 30 And it was the issue of newsworthiness itself, the editorial judgment of the Los Angeles Times, which was raised and criticized by Putnam in the complained-of broadcast. In the first paragraph of his text he referred to the story that appeared in the number one column on the number one page of Sunday's Los Angeles Times. In the third paragraph, The Los Angeles Times, which chose not to even mention Abraham Lincoln's birthday-devoted more words to their 'patriot-Marxist.' Dorothy Healey, in their Sunday edition-and its [sic] voluminous-than any other news item or topic. Yes, more space for the Communist Dorothy Healey. . . . And towards the close of the broadcast, Well, in that lengthy and boring Times story she tells . . . and later, And so it goes-this long, and as I say, boring tale of the Los Angeles Times' 'Front page patriot.' Putnam's final phrase was I urge you to let the Times hear your voice-loud and clear. 31 The above demonstrates that the prime object of Putnam's broadcast was to criticize the editorial judgment of the Los Angeles Times, to attack its opinion of what was newsworthy on that Sunday morning. We certainly are not called upon to arbitrate this controversy between the television and the newspaper journalists as to what is newsworthy; our question on this appeal is whether the Putnam broadcast raised a controversial issue of public importance under the fairness doctrine. It did not. 32 Even if we considered that the Putnam broadcast was primarily or substantially directed against petitioner Healey personally, there still was raised no controversial issue of public importance. In effect, the Los Angeles Times wrote a long article to prove that even an American Communist could be a nice, normal, ordinary housewife. The TV licensee's commentator disagreed; he questioned whether she really is a nice, normal, ordinary person. We fail to see the controversial issue of public importance here. Petitioner Healey has had favorable publicity on the front page of the Sunday Los Angeles Times, followed by six minutes repeated of substantially unfavorable publicity on the television station. Would any other Los Angeles housewife, similarly written and broadcast about, because of any other unusual aspect of her personal life, automatically became a controversial issue of public importance? We doubt it. In effect petitioner's rationale is: I am a Communist. I am (or was) a Communist leader in the Los Angeles area. Therefore, I am important. I am controversial. What I say and do is therefore a controversial issue of public importance. 33 The petitioner may be newsworthy-this is a question we leave to the editorial judgment of the Times and the licensee 18 -but we cannot see that this 57-year-old Communist housewife and her PTA activities, her children and their friends, qualify as a controversial issue of public importance under the fairness doctrine. 34