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Story 5 News and Commerce Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations 413 U.S. 376 (1973) From the beginning of the American republic,the press has been private and, at least in aspiration, profit making. Indeed, its private character is essential to its freedom and thus to the freedom of the press as we know it. News is commerce in America,and newspapers and other press entities are commercial enterprises. The press is, however, a private organization performing public tasks. At least this is so with news,the fact and opinion of public and private life upon which people rely in conducting their lives. If the press must be private to perform its public duty, must the press’s freedom extend to its private and largely commercial activities? Should its freedom extend to decisions about the organization and layout of a newspaper, to the advertisements that are run, to the classified sections? Should the labor laws or the minimum-wage laws be suspended for the press in order that profitability can be assured? Our story involves these very questions. The newspaper is the Pittsburgh Press, a respected newspaper in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The setting is the classified-advertisement section of the paper and, more specifically, the ads that the paper carries and the column headings the paper chooses to use.The issue is whether the Press should be subject to a law against sex discrimination . The conflict is between the private imperatives of commerce and the public duty of equality. The questions are the following: 1. Whether editorial decisions about advertisements, their location, and the layout of the pages on which they appear are legally distinguishable from editorial decisions about news, editorial opinion, and related layout or compositional matters 2. Whether a newspaper should be liable for publishing material that facilitates illegal acts by others 3. Whether the press’s public task of disseminating information and opinion should be performed only through its news reports and editorial opinions, and not through choices of layout and arrangement, by symbol or metaphor, or even through conduct in defiance of the law (civil disobedience) Story 5: News and Commerce 129 130 how free can the press be? In our case, as we will see, the Pittsburgh Press claims that its decisions about which advertisements to run and how to present them are editorial choices no different in character from decisions about news.It further claims that presenting classified job advertisements under sex-identified column headings communicates a view on a question of social policy—sex discrimination in employment or intrusive government regulation—just as an editorial would: indeed perhaps more powerfully because it is a conscious act of objection to the dictates of law. * * * In February 1967 the City Council of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, enacted a Human Relations Ordinance prohibiting discrimination on grounds of “race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin or place of birth” in employment, housing, and public accommodations. The Commission on Human Relations was created to enforce the new law. On July 3, 1969, the city council extended the ordinance to also prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. The 1969 amendment also made it illegal for “any person, whether or not an employer . . . , to aid . . . in the doing of any act declared to be an unlawful employment practice,” including discrimination in employment based on sex. At the time the amendment was passed, the Pittsburgh Press followed a longstanding, and not uncommon, practice of presenting help-wanted advertisements under sex-designated column headings: “Male Help Wanted,” “Female Help Wanted,” and “Male-Female Help Wanted.” In October 1969, in apparent response to the amendment, the Press modified its help-wanted column headings to “Jobs—Male Interest,” “Jobs—Female Interest,” and “Male-Female.” The following illustrative advertisements were included in an appendix to the United States Supreme Court’s opinion: Among the advertisements carried in the Sunday Pittsburgh Press on January 4, 1970, were the following: JOBS—MALE INTEREST JOBS—FEMALE INTEREST ACAD. INSTRUCTORS................... $13,000 ACAD. INSTRUCTORS ................... $13,000 ACCOUNTANTS .............................. 10,000 ACCOUNTANTS ................................ 6,000 ADM. ASS’T, CPA .............................. 15,000 AUTO-INS. UNDEWRITER ............ OPEN ADVERTISING MGR ....................... 10,000 BOOKKEEPER-INS ............................ 5,000 BOOKKEEPER F-C ............................ 9,000 CLERK-TYPIST .................................. 4,200 FINANCIAL CONSULTANT ............12,000 DRAFTSMAN ..................................... 6,000 MARKETING MANAGER ................ 15,000 KEYPUNCH D. T. ................................6,720 MGMT. TRAINEE .............................. 8,400 KEYPUNCH BEGINNER ....................4,500 OFFICE MGR. TRAINEE ................... 7,200 PROOFREADER ................................. 4,900 [3.146.105.194] Project MUSE (2024...

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