Supreme Court protects outdoor media

The outdoor media has changed significantly in the years since I first picked up a copy of Field & Stream magazine or watched Curt Gowdy reel in a fat rainbow trout on ABC Sports’ outdoor venture series “The American Sportsman.” The TV show aired from 1965 to 1986 and brought hunting and fishing adventures into living rooms across the country.

While the basics of the outdoor genre remain the same, the delivery system has expanded to include media outlets that in the 1960s were found only in the pages of sci-fi novels and Hollywood movies. Now you can watch your favorite outdoor shows on computer screens and telephones, or on TVs mounted in the back-rest of a truck seat. Or you can listen to your favorite radio shows with the help of satellites, and plug in an outdoor movie that comes imbedded on a shiny flat disk. And you thought Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio was the coolest thing going.

I suppose you could say outdoor entertainment embraced the electronic age in a big way, but the next time you settle in to watch your favorite hunting or fishing production, you might want to thank the U.S. Supreme Court that you still can.

On April 20, in an 8-1 decision, the court struck down a poorly written federal law (18 U.S.C. Section 48) that was originally written to ban so-called crush videos, portrayals of dogfighting and other violence against animals. However, because the law is so broad, it actually could have been used to halt production of hunting and fishing shows or the publishing of still photos depicting those subjects.

The law calls for a prison term of as much as five years for anyone who knowingly “creates, sells, or possesses a depiction of animal cruelty” if it is done for financial benefit. A depiction of animal cruelty is defined in the law as one “in which a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed,” if that conduct violates federal or state law where “the creation, sale, or possession takes place.”

In the court’s majority decision, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that the language within the law is so broad that it could very well have been applied to the hunting media, including print and broadcast outlets. As an example, Roberts noted that all hunting is illegal within the boundaries of Washington, D.C. Therefore, “because the statute allows each jurisdiction to export its laws to the rest of the country, (Section) 48(a) extends to any magazine or video depicting lawful hunting, so long as that depiction is sold within the nation’s capital.”

In a written statement, the National Shooting Sports Foundation said it applauds the Supreme Court’s decision “because the law was so broadly written that it could have been used to ban videos and TV content related to hunting. No one supports actual animal cruelty, which is already illegal in all 50 states, as the court noted in its 8-1 ruling. The problem with the statute is that it criminalized depictions of hunting, thereby violating the First Amendment right of free speech. No one has more respect for wildlife than hunters.”

Freelance writer Doug Nielsen is a conservation educator for the Nevada Department of Wildlife. His “In the Outdoors” column, published Thursday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is not affiliated with or endorsed by the NDOW. Any opinions he states in his column are his own. He can be reached at dougnielsen@att.net.