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But John Seigenthaler, chairman of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Tennessee's Vanderbilt University and a former newspaper editor, says, "Given the loss of human life and the threat to human life, if the FBI gave [the name] to me, I would have gone with it. But I'd be weeping now." Not so Carl Stern, a former spokesman for the Department of Justice and correspondent for NBC who now teaches journalism at George Washington University. "All this journalistic hand-wringing is unnecessary," he says. "The System worked. There is no one in the U.S. who does not have a good picture of who Richard Jewell is, what happened to him and that he is now not a suspect in the Olympic bombing. Jewell himself had virtually unlimited access to the media."
What truly angers Jewell's lawyers is not that the press reported that he was a suspect, which after all was true, but that it did so in ways that seemed to convict him on the spot. That's why the attorneys are first targeting the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which broke the story, and NBC in their lawsuits. Attorneys Wood and Martin criticize the Journal-Constitution for asserting, in its special edition on the bombing, that Jewell sought publicity. "By saying he tried to be a hero," says attorney Bryant, "they gave him the motive, but it's not true." Bryant Steele, an AT&T spokesman who set up Jewell's interviews after the bombing, confirms that Jewell was not particularly eager for press attention. "From the time I spent with him," he says, "I saw no evidence of it."
Jewell's lawyers also object to certain sections of the columns written by Dave Kindred for the paper. On Aug. 1, for example, Kindred compared Jewell to Wayne Williams, the Atlanta serial child killer. "Once upon a terrible time, federal agents came to this town to deal with another suspect who lived with his mother. Like this one, that suspect was drawn to the blue lights and sirens of police work. Like this one, he became famous in the aftermath of murder.
"His name was Wayne Williams.
"This one is Richard Jewell."
The Journal-Constitution would not comment on specifics but released a statement saying, "The public had--and has--a strong interest in the progress of the bombing investigation. They had a right to know when authorities' doubts about such a prominent figure in the bombing story led them to suspect him. Our reporting accurately pinpointed when those doubts turned Richard Jewell into the focus of the investigation."
As for NBC, Jewell and his lawyers object to comments made by Tom Brokaw on the day Jewell's name surfaced: "The speculation is that the FBI is close to 'making the case,' in their language. They probably have enough on him to arrest him right now, probably enough to prosecute him, but you always want to have enough to convict him as well." But Brokaw then went on to note several times that Jewell was not yet even an official suspect.
Jewell may have a hard time winning a libel suit, because he would have to prove that something written or broadcast was false. If a court decides that Jewell is a public figure, he will also have to prove that the falsehood was intentional or made in reckless disregard of the truth. This issue of whether Jewell is a public figure is "a tough borderline case," says Vincent Blasi, a First Amendment expert at the Columbia University School of Law.