Interviews Could be Costly in Libel Case.

LAWYER Lin Wood, champion of people abused by the press, now invokes the protection of the First Amendment for one of his most famous clients, Richard Jewell.

He's doing it, he says, not only to protect Jewell but to protect journalism itself.

If Wood's claim to be a friend of the press seems odd -- and it does to the long list of news organizations lined up against him -- consider his argument.

It comes in the libel case he filed against the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for Jewell, the former Olympic security guard who in 1996 went from hero to villain to victim. Jewell found a bomb in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park, soon was suspected of planting it and eventually was cleared.

During the 3 1/2 days when he was still a hero, Jewell granted a dozen interviews with journalists, from Katie Couric on the Today Show to a summer intern at the Journal-Constitution. He had every right under the First Amendment to do so, Wood argued to a state appeals court last week.

True enough.

The problem is that when you step into the public spotlight; you just might lose something. Jewell seems to have lost a degree of libel protection, and Wood is not the least bit happy about it.

He's not happy because an Atlanta judge ruled the initial publicity made Jewell something of a public figure, and the law makes it harder for public figures to win libel cases than private individuals.

To Wood's way of thinking, this penalizes people who agree to be interviewed by journalists. He says it curtails their First Amendment right to free speech.

This is where Wood converts himself into a friend of the press. "The fact is that when you chill the private citizen's First Amendment right to provide information about events," Wood said, "you clearly are hindering the press's ability to disseminate information about that very newsworthy event."

An alarming situation, indeed.

And yet, "I don't stay awake at night worrying about it," says Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

People either talk to reporters or they don't, and she doubts they read libel law to help them decide.

The Supreme Court gives greater leeway to a news organization to be wrong when it's reporting on public figures than on private folks. The idea is to encourage a robust and free-flowing debate on issues of public concern and of people in public life.

Public figures who believe they've been defamed must do more than prove what was said about them was false. Unlike private individuals, they must also show that the news organization knowingly published falsehoods, or at least recklessly disregarded the truth.

Is it fair, Wood asks, for Jewell's cooperation with the press to make it harder for him to right the wrong done to him?

"This notion that somehow you're losing libel protection is an odd one," says Peter Can-field, who represents the Atlanta newspapers. "If you choose to speak out on an issue that people are concerned about, you ought to realize that what you say will be subject to examination and comment by others."

In Jewell's case, the fact that he found the bomb and was willing to go on international television to say so made the story that he'd become a suspect even more sensational, even more newsworthy.

Wood has it backwards, says New York media lawyer David Schulz, who represents multiple national news organizations that filed a joint friend-of-the-court brief in the case. "He's making a First Amendment argument, but it's a First Amendment argument that would chill the press."

Ann Woolner is a columnist for Bloomberg News.