Jad Abumrad

which is to say this is newsworthy, this is worth knowing, and it is something that the whole country wants to know, and the value of that is more than the value of this individual person's privacy.

Do they make it that explicitly?

I mean, sort of putting it in terms of the public benefit outweighs the private privacy?

Yeah.

So Oliver's case, it dragged on for nine years, so from 1975 to 1984.

But this is, I'm quoting the judgment,

The record shows that the publications were not motivated by morbid and sensational prying into Appellant's private life, but rather were prompted by legitimate political concerns, i.e.

to dispel the false public opinion that gays were timid, weak, and unheroic figures, and to raise the equally important political question whether the President of the United States entertained a discriminatory attitude or bias against a minority group such as homosexuals.

So the court tossed Oliver's case out.

He lost.

He didn't get a dime.

I mean if you think about it, it is weird that a journalist can just take a person's most private details and then if it feels relevant, like if they can make that argument, they just put it out there.

If we were to go silent because somebody says don't say that about me –

Then – and the government backs him up?

But if it's meaningful, then the person out of which the meaning is being pulled painfully has nothing to say about it?

That's just weird to me.

It's really hard.

I mean I was thinking about this like even sort of on the train coming over here.

Again, Daniel Lutzer.

And it's like the thing that like makes journalism law so complicated and the things that make an invasion of privacy discussion so difficult is that like –