“Watchdog” Journalists and “Shyster” Lawyers: Analyzing Legal Reform Discourse in the Journalistic Trade Press, 1895–1899

Abstract

Studies of journalism history and law have contributed to an increasingly complete picture of the profession during the late nineteenth century, but these parallel lines of scholarship should be drawn together to deepen an understanding of the social role and legal status of journalism at a pivotal time. One key question is how the press claimed to adopt professional values such as independence and impartiality at the same time that it actively advocated for legal change on its own behalf. This study explains how the press navigated this apparent contradiction while confronting the issue of libel law reform in trade press coverage between 1895 and 1899. The article applies two related theoretical frameworks—institutionalism and the civil sphere—to analyze the structural and discursive factors in the advocacy of three trade publications. It argues that institutionalism and the civil sphere are complementary because they are responsive to each other’s shortcomings, and therefore could illuminate new pathways for scholars seeking to develop a more robust and holistic legal historical perspective for the field.

Notes

1 “Libels against Newsdealers,” Journalist, March 22, 1884.

2 See, e.g., Stephen Banning, “The Professionalization of Journalism: A Nineteenth Century Beginning,” Journalism History 24, no. 4 (1998): 157–163; W. Joseph Campbell, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms (New York: Routledge, 2006); Frank E. Fee Jr., “Breaking Bread, Not Bones: Printers’ Festivals and Professionalism in Antebellum America,” American Journalism 30, no. 3 (2013)): 308–335; Kathy Roberts Forde and Katherine Foss, “‘The Facts—the Color!—the Facts’: The Idea of a Report in American Print Culture, 1885–1910,” Book History, vol. 15 (2012): 123–151; Richard Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); David Mindich, Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Tim Vos and Teri Finneman, “The Early Historical Construction of Journalism’s Gatekeeping Role,” Journalism 18, no. 3 (2017): 265–280.

3 See, e.g., Campbell, The Year That Defined American Journalism; Forde and Foss, “‘The Facts—the Color!—the Facts’”; Kaplan, Politics and the American Press; Mindich, Just the Facts; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978); and John Nerone and Kevin Barnhurst, “US Newspaper Types, the Newsroom, and the Division of Labor, 1750–2000,” Journalism Studies 4, no. 4 (2003): 435–449.

4 See, e.g., Samantha Barbas, Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), and Jeffery A. Smith, “Moral Guardians and the Origins of the Right to Privacy,” Journalism and Communication Monographs 10, no. 1 (2008): 64–110.

5 Dean C. Smith, A Theory of Shield Laws: Journalists, Their Sources, and Popular Constitutionalism (El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2013); Robert Spellman, “Defying the Law in the Nineteenth Century: Journalistic Culture and the Source Protection Privilege,” conference paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, New Orleans, May 27, 2004.

6 Timothy Gleason, The Watchdog Concept: The Press and the Courts in Nineteenth-century America (Ames: University of Iowa Press, 1990); Norman Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men: An Interpretive History of the Law of Libel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

7 See, e.g., Mitchell Stephens, “Goodbye Nonpartisan Journalism. And Good Riddance.” Politico, June 26, 2017; Tom Warhover, “Against Objectivity,” Poynter, June 15, 2017; Laura Hazard Owen, “Voice of San Diego’s ‘What We Stand For’ Is Straightforward—and a Bold Stance against ‘Objectivity,’” Nieman Lab, March 9, 2017; Dan Gilmor, “Shoptalk: Why Journalists Should (At Least Sometimes) Be Activists,” Editor and Publisher, August 21, 2015; Johanna Dunaway, Nicholas Davis, Jeremy Padgett, and Rosanne Scholl, “Objectivity and Information Bias in Campaign News,” Journal of Communication 65, no. 5 (2015): 770–792; Jan Leach, “Overstepping Online Privacy Threatens Objectivity Expectations,” Journal of Media Ethics 31, no. 2 (2016): 136–139; Regina Marchi, “With Facebook, Blogs, and Fake News, Teens Reject Journalistic ‘Objectivity,’” Journal of Communication Inquiry 36, no. 9 (2012): 266–284.

8 The study included 143 total articles published between 1895 and 1899 in the Journalist, the Fourth Estate, and Newspaperdom. Some articles were reprinted in the trade papers from newspapers, and although they are not the original editorial work of the trade publication, their inclusion without comment or rebuttal is taken to be an endorsement, at least of the importance to the trade papers’ audience of journalists, editors, and publishers. The Journalist was published in New York City as the official weekly journal of the International League of Press Clubs beginning in 1884. The Fourth Estate was a “weekly newspaper for publishers, advertisers, advertising agents and allied interests” that was independently published in New York City and launched in 1894. Newspaperdom, a weekly “journal of newspaper publishing,” as proclaimed in its masthead, was also published in New York City, beginning in 1892.

9 See Edward Carter, “Mass Communication Law and Policy Research and the Values of Free Expression,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 94, no. 3 (2017): 641–662, and Yorgo Pasadeos, Matthew Bunker, and Kyun Soo Kim, “Influences on the Media Law Literature: A Divergence of Mass Communication Scholars and Legal Scholars?,” Communication Law and Policy 11, no. 2 (2006): 179–206. Cf. Jeffery A. Smith, Printers and Press Freedom: The Ideology of Early American Journalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Gleason, The Watchdog Concept; Elizabeth Blanks Hindman, “First Amendment Theories and Press Responsibility: The Work of Zechariah Chafee, Thomas Emerson, Vincent Blasi, and Edwin Baker,” Journalism Quarterly 69, no. 1 (1992): 48–64, and W. Wat Hopkins, “The Supreme Court Defines the Marketplace of Ideas,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 73, no. 1 (1996): 40–52.

10 David Ryfe, “Guest Editor's Introduction: New Institutionalism and the News,” Political Communication 23, no. 2 (2006): 138. Ryfe’s article leads a special issue of Political Communication devoted to mapping the landscape of institutionalist approaches to the news. It includes articles by leading thinkers in the field such as Rodney Benson, Timothy Cook, Robert Entman, Richard Kaplan, Regina Lawrence, Ryfe, and Bartholomew Sparrow. Scholars have generally dropped the “new” from “new institutionalism.” See, e.g., Ryfe, Journalism and the Public (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017): 16–17, and Thomas Hanitzsch and Tim Vos, “Journalistic Roles and the Struggle over Institutional Identity: The Discursive Constitution of Journalism,” Communication Theory 27, no. 2 (2017): 115–18.

11 Ryfe, “New Institutionalism and the News,” 138, 141–42.

12 See Timothy Cook, Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Bartholomew Sparrow, Uncertain Guardians: The News Media as a Political Institution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). According to Cook, the original question both he and Sparrow addressed was, “why, despite considerable variation in audiences and formats, the news is similar from one news outlet to the next.” Timothy Cook, “The News Media as a Political Institution: Looking Backward and Looking Forward,” Political Communication, 23, no. 2 (2006): 161. In their books, both Cook and Sparrow argued that taken-for-granted journalistic reporting routines such as detachment, balance, and impartiality must be understood as institutions through which journalists mediate their uneasy relationship with the government. See also Ryfe, “New Institutionalism and the News,” 141, and Rodney Benson, “News Media as a ‘Journalistic Field’: What Bourdieu Adds to New Institutionalism, and Vice Versa,” Political Communication 23, no. 2 (2006): 188–189.

13 Ryfe, “New Institutionalism and the News,” 141–42.

14 Sparrow, “A Research Agenda for an Institutional Media,” 152–53. Sparrow says scholars should “examine the relationship between media firms and the political process of media lobbying, media ties with legislators, media relations with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the judiciary,” ask “to what degree does policy reflect the interests of the major media firms, and to what degree is public media policy mitigated or curtailed by other factors … ?” and consider “how … media firms manage, adopt, or otherwise respond to the threats, and opportunities, that technological breakthroughs pose.”

15 Kaplan, Politics and the American Press. Specifically, Kaplan critiques Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Gerald Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992); and Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

16 Richard Kaplan, “The News about New Institutionalism: Journalism’s Ethic of Objectivity and Its Political Origins,” Political Communication 23, no. 2 (2006): 176.

17 Ibid., 174.

18 Ibid., 174. David Ryfe, “Review: Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920,” Journal of Communication 54, no. 3 (2004): 580. Moreover, other reviewers of Kaplan’s book note that David Mindich, in Just the Facts, shows objectivity had been part of the discussion surrounding journalistic professionalization for decades prior to the time that is the focus of Kaplan’s study. See Thorin Tritter, “Review: Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity, 1865–1920 by Richard L. Kaplan,” Business History Review 77, no. 4 (2003): 757–760.

19 Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): 31. See also Alexander, “Introduction: Journalism, Democratic Culture, and Creative Reconstruction,” in The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered: Democratic Culture, Professional Codes, Digital Future, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Elizabeth Butler Breese, and Marîa Luengo (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

20 Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 53–59.

21 Ibid., 38

22 Ibid., 70, 75.

23 Ibid., 60–61, 80–81.

24 Sid Bedingfield, “Culture, Power, and Political Change: Skeptics and the Civil Sphere,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2015): 160–61. Kathy Roberts Forde, “Communication and the Civil Sphere: Discovering Civil Society in Journalism Studies,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2015): 111–112. See also Forde, “Editor’s Note: JCI, Civil Sphere Theory Issue,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2015). The Bedingfield and Forde articles are part of a special issue of Journal of Communication Inquiry devoted to considering the possibility of incorporating civil sphere theory in media history and communication scholarship. See Journal of Communication Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2015).

25 Kathy Roberts Forde, “Communication and the Civil Sphere.”

26 Forde, “Communication and the Civil Sphere,” 117–121. See also Forde, “The Fire Next Time in the Civil Sphere: Literary Journalism and Justice in America, 1963,” Journalism 15, no. 5 (2014): 573–588.

27 Bedingfield, “Beating Down the Fear: The Civil Sphere and Political Change in South Carolina, 1940–1962” (2014) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina), and Bedingfield, “Culture, Power, and Political Change,” 158–60.

28 See Aldon Morris, “Naked Power and the Civil Sphere,” Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2007): 615–628. Alexander responds to Morris’s critique in Alexander, “On the Interpretation of the Civil Sphere: Understanding and Contention in Contemporary Social Science,” Sociological Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2007): 641–659. See also David Paul Nord, “Interest Groups, Political Communication, and Jeffrey Alexander’s Sociology of Power,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2015): 125–138. Nord argues that Alexander’s description of political power and journalism is “curiously narrow,” failing to draw on mass communication scholarship that converges on the idea that “journalism is enmeshed in a power structure that it does not control.”

29 John Nerone, “The Music of the Spheres,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2015): 174, 184–85. Nerone argues that mass communication scholars may be better served by Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of hegemony in the journalistic field or Habermas’s idea of a public sphere geared for critical rational debate. See Pierre Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism (New York: Pluto Press, 1998), and Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

30 Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 92–94.

31 Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 92–105. Where Alexander argues such interest groups always seek to expand the scope of conflict through communicative institutions in order to achieve inclusion, however, Nord argues that “sometimes they do, but sometimes they do not.” Nord provides the example of conservative evangelical groups as accomplishing different political goals both by advancing into mainstream politics and civil society as well as retreating into targeted lobbying. Nord, “Interest Groups, Political Communication, and Jeffrey Alexander’s Sociology of Power,” 134–35.

32 Although Alexander’s primary case studies focus on the struggles of African Americans, women, and Jews for political inclusion, his book provides numerous other examples of the use of binary codes in policy debates not involving such explicit exclusion.

33 The number of daily newspapers published in the United States rose from 254 in 1850 to 574 in 1870, and to 971 in 1880. See Alfred M. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York: Macmillan, 1937). In 1880, of the 2,605 counties that made up the United States, 2,079 of them published at least one newspaper. Within those counties, 1,026 towns had two newspapers and 329 towns had five or more. See S. N. D. North, History and Present Condition of the Newspaper and Periodical Press of the United States, with a Catalogue of the Publications of the Census Year, Census Office, Department of Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1884) 193.

34 See Nerone and Barnhurst, “US Newspaper Types, the Newsroom, and the Division of Labor,” 443; Gerald Baldasty, The Commercialization of the News in the Nineteenth Century, 81–83.

35 Campbell, The Year That Defined American Journalism.

36 Campbell, The Year That Defined American Journalism, 70; 69–117.

37 See, for example, Banning, “The Professionalization of Journalism,” 157–64; Kaplan, Politics and the American Press; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1981): 4–5; Ted Smythe, The Gilded Age Press: 1865–1900 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Hazel Dicken-Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989): 18–20. A good contemporary view of the emerging professional standards of journalism, in the words of well-known editors, publishers, and commentators such as Whitelaw Reid, Charles A. Dana, Henry J. Raymond, Horace Greeley, E. L. Godkin, Henry Ward Beecher, and Mary L. Booth, is Charles F. Wingate, ed., Views and Interviews on Journalism (New York: F. B. Patterson, 1875).

38 See Stephen Banning, “Political or Professional? The Nineteenth Century National Editorial Association,” conference paper presented at 2013 AEJMC National Conference, Washington, DC (on file with the author); Banning, “The Professionalization of Journalism”; and Patrick File, “Retract, Expand: Libel Law, the Professionalization of Journalism, and the Limits of Press Freedom at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Communication Law and Policy 22, no. 3 (2017): 275–308. See also Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States from 1690 to 1872 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873), 656–66.

39 Edwin Emery, History of the American Newspaper Publishers Association (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950), 3; Benjamin Briggs Herbert, The First Decennium of the National Editorial Association of the United States, 35. A notable feature of the ILPC was that both men and women were welcome as members and leaders. See Harry Wellington Wack, “The International League of Press Clubs,” Overland Monthly, vol. 29 (1897): 631.

40 Other journalists’ trade publications from the era included the Writer, a monthly “magazine for literary workers” launched in 1887 and the National Printer-Journalist, a publication of the NEA beginning in 1893. The National Printer-Journalist later became the National Amateur Journalist. Uneven archival availability limited the trade publications studied for this research to the Journalist, the Fourth Estate, and Newspaperdom.

41 See Banning, “The Professionalization of Journalism,” and Banning, “Not Quite Professional: Bohemian and Elitist Newspaper Clubs in Nineteenth-century Chicago,” Journalism History 40, no. 1 (2014): 28–39. See also Andie Tucher, “Reporting for Duty: The Bohemian Brigade, the Civil War, and the Social Construction of the Reporter,” Book History, vol. 9 (2006): 131–157.

42 Thomas Cooley, A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union (Boston: Little, Brown, 1868), 452–56. See Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men, 164–65, 301, n. 27, 31.

43 Jeffery A. Smith, “Moral Guardians and the Origins of the Right to Privacy”; Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review vol. 4 (1890): 193. Warren and Brandeis included “the right to be let alone” in their vision of a right to privacy.

44 Dean C. Smith, A Theory of Shield Laws, 34–35, 49–104; David Gordon, “Protection of News Sources: The History and Legal Status of the Newsman’s Privilege” (1971) (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin); Spellman, “Defying the Law in the Nineteenth Century,” conference paper, International Communication Association, New Orleans, May 27, 2004, 41 (on file with the author).

45 Hudson, Journalism in the United States, 747. See Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men, 197; Gleason, The Watchdog Concept, 66–67; Gleason, “The Libel Climate of the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journalism Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1993): 893–906, 895. According to John D. Stevens et al., the number of reported criminal libel prosecutions also rose steadily between 1876 and 1906. Stevens et al., “Criminal Libel as Seditious Libel, 1916–65,” Journalism Quarterly 43 (1966): 110–13.

46 Gleason, The Watchdog Concept, 66–67. As Gleason put it, “the case law suggests that newspapers’ proclivity toward convicting defendants in criminal actions and inserting editorial comment into news reports generated libel suits.”

47 John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 59–61; John Matzko, “‘The Best Men of the Bar’: The Founding of the American Bar Association,” in The New High Priests: Lawyers in Post Civil War America, ed. Gerald W. Gawalt (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1984), 75–78.

48 See Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men, 317, n. 46. The Central Law Journal reported contingency fees were an “all but universal custom of the profession” in 1881. Central Law Journal 13 (1881): 381. According to Lawrence Friedman, although “the upper part of the bar looked with beady eyes at this practice, [it] had its merits, [because] it made it possible for the poor man to sue the rich corporation.” Friedman, A History of American Law (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 422–23.

49 See Martin Newell, The Law of Defamation, Libel, and Slander in Civil and Criminal Cases: As Administered in the Courts of the United States of America (Chicago: Callaghan and Co., 1890), 882–909.

50 See John Townshend, A Treatise on the Wrongs Called Slander and Libel, and on the Remedy by Civil Action for Those Wrongs, 4th ed. (New York: Baker, Voorhis, 1890), 304–05.

51 Gleason, The Watchdog Concept, 53–79. It is worth noting that Gleason did not find that any publisher defendants used this term in their legal defense; rather, he argued that the public interest–based defense they asserted reflected this twentieth-century rationale for press freedom.

52 See File, “Retract, Expand: Libel Law, the Professionalization of Journalism, and the Limits of Press Freedom at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.”

53 Ibid.

54 See Banning, “The Professionalization of Journalism,” and Banning, “Not Quite Professional.” See also Tucher, “Reporting for Duty.”

55 “Necessity for Libel Law Reform,” Newspaperdom, January 30, 1896, p. 5.

56 “The Libel Laws,” Fourth Estate, February 4, 1897, p. 1. See 1898 New Jersey Laws 476.

57 “Illinois Legislation,” Fourth Estate, February 11, 1897, p. 6. See 1897 Illinois Laws 297.

58 “Wisconsin Libel Law,” Newspaperdom, March 19, 1896, p. 1.

59 “Palmer Loses,” Fourth Estate, March 18, 1897, p. 2; see also “Libels against Newsdealers,” Journalist, March 22, 1884.

60 “Libel Laws and Libel Litigations,” Fourth Estate, February 25, 1897, p.11.

61 Ibid.

62 “Note and Comment,” Fourth Estate, March 24, 1898, p. 4.

63 “Libel Fight Won,” Fourth Estate, June 24, 1897, p. 1.

64 “Dismissal of Libel Suits,” Newspaperdom, December 10, 1896, p. 5.

65 “A Manager’s Chief Difficulty,” Newspaperdom, November 21, 1895, p. 1.

66 “Current Comment,” Newspaperdom, September 17, 1896, p. 6.

67 “Note and Comment,” Fourth Estate, March 25, 1897, p. 6.

68 “With the Various Clubs and Associations,” Fourth Estate, January 21, 1897, p. 8.

69 “Note and Comment,” Fourth Estate, February 25, 1897, p. 6.

70 “Palmer Loses,” Fourth Estate, March 18, 1897, p. 2.

71 “Note and Comment,” Fourth Estate, March 25, 1897, p. 6. At least one state supreme court decision ruled that a state retraction statute unconstitutionally favored newspapers as a class by denying a plaintiff an opportunity for just compensation. See Park v. Free Press Co., 40 N.W. 731 (1888).

72 “A Just Provision in Libel Law,” Newspaperdom, April 1895, p. 294.

73 “Reform in the Libel Law,” Newspaperdom, November 26, 1896, p. 4.

74 “The Press of To-day,” Newspaperdom, October 10, 1895, p. 1. See also “The Massachusetts Libel Law,” Newspaperdom, July 1, 1897, p. 4 (calling the law “fair to both public and publishers,” and Untitled Editorial, Newspaperdom, July 15, 1897, p. 4, calling a new law “fair, satisfactory, and salutary.”

75 “The Editor and Libel,” Journalist, July 30, 1898, p. 135.

76 “Vindicator Vindicated,” Newspaperdom, March 18, 1897, p. 4.

77 “An Editorial Challenge,” Fourth Estate, August 4, 1898, p. 4.

78 “The Past Year,” Fourth Estate, January 6, 1898, p. 3.

79 “Illinois Modern Libel Law Repealed,” Fourth Estate, June 10, 1897, p. 2.

80 The term “shyster” was used in “Libel Speculation,” Newspaperdom, July 23, 1896, p. 6; “Libel Reform in England,” Fourth Estate. April 7, 1898, p. 4; “Do Not Publish News of Libel Suits,” Fourth Estate, July 8, 1897, p. 1; “Union against Shysters,” Fourth Estate, February 3, 1898, p. 6; “Libel Reform in England,” Fourth Estate, April 7, 1898, p. 4; “Libel in England,” Fourth Estate, April 28, 1898, p. 5. The term blackmail appeared in the context of libel law in “Libels against Newsdealers,” Journalist, March 22, 1884, n.p.; “Prostitution of Libel Laws,” Newspaperdom, July 1894, p. 18; “Union against Shysters,” Fourth Estate, February 3, 1898, p. 6; and “Bill to Discourage Libel Suits,” Newspaperdom, November 23, 1899, p. 7.

81 See, for example, “A Manager’s Chief Difficulty,” Newspaperdom, November 21, 1895, p. 1.

82 “Libel Laws,” Journalist, March 16, 1895, n.p.

83 “Illinois Editors,” Newspaperdom, March 19, 1896, p. 1.

84 “First Step Toward Reform,” Newspaperdom, June 4, 1896, p. 6.

85 “Bill to Discourage Libel Suits,” Newspaperdom, November 23, 1899, p.7. The bill did not pass. In spirit, it resembled an “Anti-SLAPP” statute, a legal innovation of the late twentieth century aimed at limiting frivolous “strategic lawsuits against public participation.” See George Pring and Penelope Canan, SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); Kristen Rasmussen, “SLAPP Stick: Fighting Frivolous Lawsuits against Journalists: A State-by-State Guide to Anti-SLAPP Laws,” Reporters Committee for Freedom Press, http://www.rcfp.org/slapp-stick-fighting-frivolous-lawsuits-against-journalists/statutory-solution (accessed August 17, 2018).

86 “Suppressing Libel News,” Newspaperdom, June 11, 1896, p. 6; “Do Not Publish News of Libel Suits,” Fourth Estate, July 8, 1897, p. 1.

87 “Do Not Publish News of Libel Suits,” Fourth Estate, July 8, 1897, p. 1.

88 “Union against Shysters,” Fourth Estate, February 3, 1898, p. 6.

89 “Libel Reform in England,” Fourth Estate, April 7, 1898, p. 4; and “Libel in England,” Fourth Estate, April 28, 1898, p. 5.

90 “The Past Year,” Fourth Estate, January 6, 1898, p. 3. See also “Palmer v. Mathews” Reports of Cases Heard and Determined in the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York (1898): 149–59.

91 “Note and Comment,” Fourth Estate, November 24, 1898, p. 4.

92 “Those Tyndale Palmer Libel Suits,” Fourth Estate, July 22, 1897, p. 1; see also “Tireless in Litigation,” Fourth Estate, November 3, 1898, p. 4, and “Note and Comment,” Fourth Estate, November 24, 1898, p. 4. The wire-service defense, a qualified privilege that can block a libel suit against a news organization for defamatory statements when they were received and republished from a reliable wire service, has gained judicial recognition in about half of the states since the 1930s. See Kyu Ho Youm, “The ‘Wire Service’ Libel Defense,” Journalism Quarterly 70, no. 3 (1993): 682–691. Courts began to recognize a single-publication rule, under which a plaintiff cannot sue the same publisher more than once for the same article and can receive damages only once for a single libelous article regardless of how often it is republished elsewhere, in the 1940s. The single-publication rule was recognized in Hartmann v. Time, Inc., 166 F.2d 12 (3d Cir. 1947). In 1952, a Uniform Single Publication Act was drafted by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws in 1952, and appears in Restatement of the Law, Second: Torts, “Single and Multiple Publications, § 577A” (Philadelphia: American Law Institute, 1977).

93 Alexander, The Civil Sphere, 92–105.

94 Ryfe, “New Institutionalism and the News,” 139.