NCJ Number
75165
Journal
JOURNALISM QUARTERLY Volume: 56 Issue: 3 Dated: (Fall 1979) Pages: 464-468
Date Published
1979
Length
5 pages
Annotation
A study employing newspaper content analysis to determine the violation rate of fair trial and free press guidelines adopted by the American Bar Association (ABA), is discussed.
Abstract
Since the ABA adopted its Standards Relating to Fair Trial and Free Press in 1968, 23 States have agreed to accept voluntary press-bar guidelines specifying the types of potentially prejudicial information that should not be published or broadcast before a trial. This study examined pretrial news reporting in a subsample of three randomly selected issues from each of 29 newspapers which were chosen as a national probability sample. The issues appeared during a 5-week period starting on June 15, 1976. Of the 29 newspapers, 16 were from States with press-bar agreements and 13 from States with no agreements. At least one violation of an ABA guideline was found in 67.7 percent of the 167 stories examined; 188 violations or an average of 1.13 per story were discovered. The guideline violated most frequently (in 35.3 percent of the stories) was that which cautions against published opinions about an accused's character, guilt, or innocence. The guideline violated least frequently was that which cautions against publishing references to the results of any examinations or tests. The kind of information that research indicates may be most damaging to a fair trial, i.e., admissions, confessions, or statements from the accused, appeared in 12 percent of the stories. Newspapers in States with press-bar agreements violated the guidelines slightly more often than those in States without agreements. Furthermore, the rate of identification of sources was nearly the same for stories with violations as for stories without violations. Four tables and 16 footnotes are included.