International Libel and Privacy Handbook

Charles J. Glasser, Jr. has spent the majority of his life in the news industry as a journalist and media lawyer. Glasser began his love affair with journalism as a stringer for United Press International, covering the 1972 Democratic and Republican National Conventions while still a high school student. Through the 1980s, Glasser then became a staffer at several daily newspapers and international wire services, where he covered civil wars in El Salvador, insurgencies in Nicaragua, and enterprise stories out of England, India, Cuba, Haiti and elsewhere. After a brief stint as a copy editor at Time Inc., he attended NYU Law School, simultaneously working in the Legal Department of NBC News in New York, where he helped research legal issues for Nightly News with Tom Brokaw and Dateline. He was honored at graduation in 1996 with the Arthur T. Vanderbilt medal for his contribution to the legal community.

As a lawyer, Glasser started work in Portland, Maine, representing the Portland Press-Herald, Readers’ Digest, and several local broadcasters on First Amendment issues, and briefed the precedent-setting Levinsky’s v. Wal-Mart, which several Courts of Appeals have followed to hold that words with several reasonable meanings are not defamatory. He returned to New York in 1998, where as a litigation associate, he defended several nationally-known publications and broadcasters including the New York Post and Fox television. He joined Bloomberg as its first Global Media Counsel in 2002, where he served for more than 12 years and was responsible for prepublication review, ombudsman issues, ethics inquiries, newsroom litigation and libel training for more than 2000 reporters in 120 bureaus around the world on a 24-hour a day basis. He was also involved in several significant amicus efforts, including Snyder v. Phelps, where the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that news reports about offensive protests could not create liability for news organizations depicting those protests, and litigated the landmark Freedom of Information case Bloomberg L.P. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, where the Federal Reserve was forced to disclose previously secret documents detailing a secret multi-billion program lending interest-free money to collapsing banks. He currently runs a small media consultancy and is an Adjunct Professor of Media Ethics at both New York University’s Arthur Carter Center Graduate School for Journalism and at the Newmark/CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

He is an avid jazz guitarist, writer, and restores vintage Jaguar automobiles. His website is www.charlesglasser.net and can be found on social media at www.facebook.com.