By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu

Dr. David E. Sumner, a professor emeritus of journalism at Ball State (1990-2015), is currently a full-time author and working on his eight book. He recently wrote Fumbled Call: The Bear Bryant-Wally Butts Football Scandal that Split the Supreme Court and Changed American Libel Law.

Q: Describe the focus of your book. 

A: Using a narrative structure, the book tells, first, what happened behind the scenes preceding Butts v. Curtis Publishing  libel trial against the Saturday Evening Post in 1963 by Wally Butts, the ex-coach of the University of Georgia football team. The case is historically significant because the Post appealed the case to the Supreme Court in 1967, which redefined and expanded the definition of “public figure” in a 5-4 divided decision.

The Post article “The Story of a College Football Fix” accused Butts of giving away inside team information to Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant in a telephone conversation to help Alabama win 35-0 in the season’s opener. (Bryant filed a separate libel lawsuit and settled out of court after the Butts trial.) The University of Georgia president, two assistant coaches, and four faculty members of the Athletic Board testified against Butts. The book presents several facts that suggest perjury by the coaches to cover up what they said in their telephone conversation. Butts could have been motivated by revenge because he had been fired as coach but remained athletic director with access to team information.  The first eight chapters tell how the story originated, and the last eight chapters give a day-by-day account of arguments and witness testimonies.

By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, University of Florida, rgrant@jou.ufl.edu

Dr. Kevin Lerner, an assistant professor of Communication/Journalism at Marist College, wrote a book titled Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism.

Q: Describe the focus of your book.

A: Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism examines the last real challenge to the ideal of objectivity among the mainstream American press in the 1970s. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, Women’s Liberation, the student free speech movement, and youth culture in general began to erode confidence in the institutions of American life, and the press was among these. Amid this turmoil, a young Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist named Tony Lukas began to question whether or not the institutional pose of objectivity could adequately cover everything that was going on. He founded the journalism review (MORE) with his friend Dick Pollak and William Woodward, who brought the money to support this new magazine. (MORE) covered American journalism from 1971 to 1978, pushing back on many of the assumptions of the hidebound institutional press. (MORE) pushed these institutions to adapt to new cultural and political atmospheres, and at the same time chronicled the rise of the corporate press that would dominate the 1980s. Provoking the Press tells the story of this group of journalists, their often funny, often angry journalism review, and the “Counter-Conventions” they held a half dozen times in the seventies, which drew names such as David Halberstam, Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Katharine Graham, Mike Wallace, and Carl Bernstein. It is a book about the power (and limits) of press criticism to change the practices of journalism, and also one about alternatives to the dominant model of journalism in the U.S.