Price v. Time Revisited: The Need For Medium-Neutral Shield Laws In An Age Of Strict Construction

Abstract

Journalists were alarmed when, in 2005, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit denied shield-law protection to Don Yaeger, an investigative reporter for Sports Illustrated, in a libel suit by fired football coach Mike Price. Yaeger is a journalist, and Alabama's shield law offers absolute protection even when a journalist is a party to a case. The court's decision turned on the fact that Alabama's seventy-three-year-old statute does not include the word “magazine.” This article shows that this hole in the “covered medium” language of Alabama's statute is not uncommon among the nation's thirty-six shield laws and that the Eleventh Circuit's strict reading of the statute's text is not at odds with current trends in statutory interpretation. Those two facts, combined with the rise of the Internet as an important vehicle for journalism, suggest the time is ripe to scrutinize and modernize shield laws, some of which have been on the books for more than a century.