PAUL M.

HEBERT LAW CENTER

Louisiana State University

Final Examination

Media Law 5430

Professor Christine Corcos Spring 2020

This exam is a take-home, open book, open materials, examination. You may take it at any time
between April 28 at 8:30 a.m. and May 10 at 4:30 p.m. Once you begin the exam, you have 24
hours to complete it. However, you must submit your exam no later than May 10 at 4:30 p.m.
even if you have not had 24 hours to complete it.
Answer the questions based on applicable US federal and state law. If you need additional facts
to resolve a particular issue, please indicate the additional facts you need to resolve the issue
and tell me how the issue would be resolved depending on those facts. If you assume any facts
not given in the question, please tell me what those facts are. If facts given are irrelevant, and
you think it necessary to say so, please do so. I have indicated the amount of time that I suggest
you spend on each question.
I will read and grade each of your answers separately, so please do not refer in one answer to
your response or analysis in another answer.
Please see below for information on how to get technical assistance if you should need it.
“If any technical issues arise during your exam, you should contact the LSU Law IT HelpDesk
at 225-578-4898 or email lawits@lsu.edu.  You will be able to reach IT personnel between 8:30
am and 4:30 pm on exam days.  Requests for assistance made outside of those hours will be
addressed the following day."

Question 1. Sixty points. One hour, thirty minutes.

You are an attorney at Pride & Wade, a leading New Orleans law firm. One of P&W’s clients is WHAM-
TV, a New Orleans television station.

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You are in your office at 4 p.m. on a lovely Friday afternoon when your administrative assistant sticks his
head in the office. “Jane Johnson from WHAM-TV is on the phone. She says there’s a situation
developing regarding some story that WHAM aired last Friday and that CNN picked up and aired over
the weekend. Can you take the call now? She’s pretty insistent.”

You look at the time and realize that you can’t leave early today. “Sure. Put her through. Thanks.”

Jane, the news director at WHAM, is indeed concerned. “Do you remember that short segment on the
resident, Selena Jones, working at Jimmie Davis Memorial Hospital who posted that video about the lack
of PPE,1 and then broke down on camera? WHAM aired it along with her claim that the hospital wasn’t
providing any N95 masks or other equipment to protect docs and nurses from COVID-19. It first ran last
Friday night, April 24th during the 6:30 news hour, a couple of weeks ago.”

“I remember hearing about it. Tell me more,” you say.

“Well, CNN picked it up and ran it around 11:30, and then several times that next Saturday morning.
Hundreds of thousands of people saw it. But it also ran on WHAM’s website, and WHAM’s social media
people tweeted it out, with the video. It went viral. And not in a good way. ”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone who writes for Vice Magazine, a reporter named Jeff Lewis, has posted a series of tweets
saying that Jones only worked at Davis Hospital for a couple of days before posting that video. Also, that
she hadn’t worked as a doctor for about a year before starting at the hospital. Before that, she was
some kind of social media blogger or influencer or something. She has an Instagram account. She posts
under the name TravelDoc and posts about her trips around the world. She used to have about 350,000
followers.”

“Used to have?” You’re started to get a little concerned.

“Well, according to Jeff Lewis, she used to post photos of herself in lingerie in different places around
the world. This was about 2 years ago. As it turned out, she never actually visited any of the places she
claimed to visit. She just photoshopped herself into the pictures. Someone—I don’t know who—outed
her by saying the photos didn’t look real. Other people piled on, and the next thing you know, she’d lost
almost all of her followers and her advertisers, including Victoria’s Secret. She tried to salvage her
reputation by saying that the photos just expressed how she felt about herself wearing the lingerie—
that sometimes she felt like she was in Paris, and sometimes in London, and sometimes in Bali. But
nobody seems to have believed her. So she dropped off the face of the earth.”

Your head is starting to spin as you type all this information into a document on your laptop. “And now
she’s apparently back, practicing medicine. Didn’t anybody at WHAM make a connection between
TRAVELDOC and this doctor?”

“Well, nobody was looking for it. And she’s a real doctor. She did graduate from medical school five
years ago—UCLA, and was a resident at Cedars Sinai for a year, but left, I guess, to be TRAVELDOC. She
was a model before medical school. She competed in some beauty pageants, too—she’s sort of
attractive.”

1
PPE means Personal Protective Equipment.

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“So, wait—where are we going with this?” you ask.

“Well, here’s the problem. Jeff Lewis also tweeted that he called someone at Davis Memorial, a friend of
his on staff, and that friend says there’s enough PPE for the docs and nurses. Maybe not a lot, but
enough. So late that Saturday night, when people started to react to the story and the video, they also
started to get suspicious about what she was saying. Some people responded to his tweet saying they
didn’t believe her, and other said they knew her, or of her, and did believe her. “Who’s HIS source? Do
you know?”

“No. He doesn’t say.”

“I’m sending links to you in an email right now,” Jane says. She continues, “We’re sort of worried about
the impact of this story. The hospital’s general counsel has called, asking for a retraction of the story.
What do you think?”

“Before we get to that, could I see the video? What exactly does Jones say? Can you tell me where I can
look at it? Or get me a transcript? And I’d like to see Jeff Lewis’s tweets, too, if you have links.”

When you get the links, you open the video to watch it and read the transcript. You also read Lewis’s
tweets; they say what Jane has told you he has tweeted.

Below is a transcript of what Dr. Jones says in the video. She is crying.

 “I quit my job today. I went into work and I was assigned to care for COVID patients on an ICU unit that
has been converted to a designated COVID unit. None of the nurses are wearing masks. None of the
docs are wearing masks. I brought my own mask but I was told I couldn’t use it because it wasn’t
hospital-issued. Health care professionals aren’t being protected. This country isn’t prepared for this
crisis.”

The reporter in the video continues with a discussion of COVID-19’s impact on New Orleans, and asks a
Davis Memorial Hospital spokesperson for comment. The spokesperson says only that Dr. Jones no
longer works at the hospital and that doctors and nurses there have adequate PPE. The reporter says,
“There seem to be two stories about whether health care professionals at this hospital have enough PPE
available to treat the patients under their care. Are they putting themselves, their patients, and others,
including the public, at risk? At least one doctor who’s worked here says the answer to that question is
“Yes.”

The segment ends.

You start doing some preliminary research, when your assistant interrupts. “It’s Jane again. Shall I put
her through?”

“It’s fine.”

When Jane comes on the line, she’s even more concerned. “Hi, again. I just found out something else.
You know that video? Well, things are even worse than we thought.”

“Now what?”

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“Well, apparently, Jones posted that video to her Facebook page, but her page is private. Somebody
leaked it to WHAM.”

“WHO?”

Jane doesn’t answer.

“Jane! Do we know who gave it to the reporter, or someone at WHAM?”

Jane finally says, “No, the reporter at WHAM says she doesn’t know who sent it to her. They have a
system for anonymous submissions, for tips. The system deidentifies senders. Jones’s lawyer has now
sent a letter indicating that Jones objects to the use of the video, and is considering a lawsuit. Now
what?”

You are, of course, ready to bang your head on your desk a few times. However, you say, “OK. If you
think of anything else I should know, please call. Don’t email. I’m going to do some research and I will
get back to you within twenty-four hours.”

As you continue your preliminary research, you do a quick Google search for “Selena Jones and doctor
and California.” You find many stories about the video. You also find stories on the fifth screen about
Selena Jones’s career as TRAVELDOC. Finally, on the seventh screen, you find that Selena Jones did
indeed compete in some beauty pageants. She was briefly Miss Orange County USA 2012, and headed
to the Miss California USA pageant that year, but had to step down when pageant officials asked her
about accusations that surfaced that she had plagiarized some papers during college. While she denied
the allegations, she did eventually agree to step down. The school that she attended, USC, seems never
to have taken any action in respect to plagiarism against her, and she graduated with honors, then
enrolled at UCLA Medical School later, and graduated with an M.D.

Which parties might have causes of action against WHAM and what might they be? What defenses
might WHAM have? In your opinion, would they be successful? Why or why not? If you think they might
be successful, should WHAM seek to avoid trial and try to arrange some other sort of outcome to these
disputes?

Question 2. Sixty points One hour, thirty minutes.

You’re an experienced attorney at the New Orleans firm of Wolfram and Hart, in charge of the media
practice section. You also help write a popular online column called “Bad Legal Take!” for the New
Orleans Lawyer, a legal publication for law students that enjoys nationwide circulation. One of your
approaches for your column is to present tweets that demonstrate a poor grasp of legal principles and
explain how and why they do so. In this way, you hope that you can show students how to think through
the misapprehensions and mistakes about law and the legal system that often pop up in popular
discourse. You are always careful not to take a political position or take sides when explaining legal
principles or presenting legal analysis. You keep your analyses to the point, giving relevant constitutional
principles, statutes, cases, and other pertinent material as needed. Your editor always wants you to
keep your column to about 1500 words; print can be expensive! Sometimes you go over that limit,

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though. When your writing is really good, she doesn’t edit you, and she hasn’t refused to run your
column yet.

Here are the tweets you’ve decided to present and analyze for this month’s column. Please write your
analysis with the guidelines above in mind, explaining what, if anything, the writer is incorrect about,
and why, to your readers.

Tweet 1. GeauxTigers (GT) writes: “The President of the United States can revoke the license of
any network that refuses to air his press conferences during an emergency because it means that the
network has abandoned its constitutional mandate and can no longer have press protections.”

Tweet 2. Suzanne (S) writes: “The media can be held accountable for publishing fake news, and
that includes lies. The First Amendment gives you and me freedom of speech, but when an entity has
the power to affect the whole country with fake stories, they can be prosecuted. That’s the way it
should be.”

END OF THE EXAM!

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HAVE A WONDERFUL SUMMER!

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