This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

It's been 230 years since the First Amendment, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights,

became part of our Constitution in 1791. And in those two centuries, the amendment that gives the media

the right to be has undergone significant changes, but perhaps none more important than in

1964. At the time, protections offered to the press were narrow. News outlets could be shuddered

if sued by public figures over minor inaccuracies. But as the nation watched the civil rights

movement progress, the Supreme Court

rendered a decision in the case New York Times versus Sullivan that would change journalism forever.

Some years ago, on the 50th anniversary of that decision, we sat down with Andrew Cohen, a fellow

at the Brennan Center for Justice

and senior editor at the Marshall Project to talk about what happened.

This was a story about the civil rights movement.

It was a story about the New York Times covering the civil rights movement,

and it was the story of local officials, in this case in Alabama,

trying to use state libel laws to essentially

chill the press to force reporters either not to cover stories in the state or to cover civil

rights stories in a way that was not true and more favorable to local officials than it was

to the civil rights movement.

It begins, as you note in your piece, in March of 1960, and it wasn't about coverage.

It was about a political ad that appeared in the New York Times, broadly criticizing southern

officials for their aggressive response to civil rights protests.

Right. It's a full-page ad, which essentially decries the

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