Absence of Malice

The movie, Absence of Malice, is titled well because in the case it covers of Mr. Gallagher, there is no malice. This being said, does that mean that everything the reporters and government did along the way were ethical and/legal?

From Megan and that government’s side, if there was no malice, everything should be fine. They tried to get hold of Mr. Gallagher before printing the story, Megan spoke with her lawyer beforehand to make sure it was okay to run the story, and the investigation was a breaking story that people needed to hear about.

If you look at this movie from someone else’s perspective, it isn’t that clear that everything done was legal and ethical. First of all, Mr. Rosen left that government file for the investigation on his desk purposely for Megan to find and look at while he was out of the office. This is by no means legal and it is in fact a federal crime. Secondly, before running the story, Megan only calls Mr. Gallagher once to confirm the story. Although she called once and he didn’t answer, it’s questionable if this was ethical to post the story without talking to him to fact check it. Another thing that did not seem ethical was Megan writing the story about Gallagher’s friend and then leaving it open which led to someone else publishing it and then that ended up having the consequences of the woman taking her life. Even though it was not Megan’s fault the woman committed suicide, she knew that the woman did not want that story published because of her dad, her job and religion. One of the main obvious ethical issues is sleeping with your source. Megan becomes involved with Gallagher and sleeps with him which causes a conflict of interest.

With all of that being said, I have some thoughts on what I would do if I were Megan. I honestly would have opened that government file because I would be too curious and I would want to report the best news I could. I would  have also published the story when Megan did because the public does not like to wait on stories. Since Megan did not have any knowledge on any falsity in the investigation, I think she made the right call in publishing it. All that said, I would not have slept with Mr. Gallagher and I probably would have not published the story from Mr. Gallagher’s friend or I would have published it with an anonymous source.

The cases that associate with this are Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts and Associated Press v. Walker. These cases are important because one case was considered libel (Butts) and one was not (Walker). Due to Mr. Gallagher not being a public figure, malice was the only thing needed to be covered and as the title says, there was absence of Malice so this was not a libel case. Another important case I would bring up is Gertz v. Robert Welch Inc. because it did establish that citizens, who are not public officials, have more protection from libelous statements.

This changed journalism because I think the movie portrayed examples of what should and should not be done in journalism. It also showed people what malice means and helped people understand what it means to be libel and what protection public versus private citizens have.

Sources:

Nicole Kraft’s 3404 Comm lecture 6.1 “Libel”

Absence of Malice movie