TV is blamed for a crime
A teen-age girl is raped in the shower of a detention home by four other female inmates wielding a "plumber's helper." A nine-year-old girl is raped with a beer bottle by four youngsters on a San Francisco beach. The first rape is pure fiction, a scene from NBC'S 1974 two-hour made-for-TV movie Born Innocent. The second is a grotesque real-life replay of the TV scene, performed by three girls, 11, 14 and 15, with a boy, 15, standing watch. According to a police investigator, one of the assailants admitted having seen Born Innocent on TV four days before.
Should television be liable for inspiring such violent crime? Last week the Supreme Court cleared the way for a jury to try an $11 million negligence suit filed by the victim, Olivia Niemi, and her mother, Valeria Pope Niemi, against NBC and the Chronicle Publishing Co., owners of KRON-TV. Niemi's lawyer, Marvin Lewis, charges that by depicting a graphic rape scene in a movie aired at 8 p.m., when many children are watching, the network and the station are responsible for her daughter's rape.
The case raises two compelling−and competing−concerns. In support of Niemi, the California Medical Association cited copious evidence that TV contributes to violence, including a study commissioned by ABC in which 22 of 100 juvenile offenders confessed to having borrowed criminal techniques from television. But some psychologists argue that violent programs provide a vicarious release for aggression. The networks and some First Amendment scholars fear that Niemi's suit, if successful, will drastically undermine constitutional free speech guarantees. "I would regard it a very dangerous principle that would hold a broadcaster or a publisher liable for the imitation of what it showed or published in a creative context," commented Columbia Law Professor Benno Schmidt Jr. "It would be a dreadfully chilling rule of law." In a friend-of-the-court brief, CBS warned that the principle could be extended to press coverage of violent news−hijackings or murders, for example.
NBC contends that the First Amendment should be an absolute bar to the Niemi suit. But the California Court of Appeal disagreed, ruling that Niemi was entitled to a jury trial. Last week the high court refused to review the decision. In doing so, the court was making no judgment on the merits; apparently it simply wanted to hold off until the case runs its course in the California courts. But whether in this case or another, the Justices someday will have to decide just how much the First Amendment protects publishers and broadcasters when life contagiously imitates art−or the evening news. ∎