Page 11 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

2 Geoffrey Sykes

nature and appeal of detection, litigation and court genres. One would assume
that however open courts were to all forms of mass media, there would still be
substantial interest by audiences and readers in fictionalised and behavioural
accounts of crime, judgment, conflict and disputes.
In terms of research, a quantum of literature and studies has emerged on
both issues – into the terms, questions and regulation of access of cameras to
courts, for example, and also to the structure, style and meaning of genres of
literature and media shows with legal subject matter. The resolution of both of
these long standing and inter-related issues, this volume will argue, resides
very much in the contemporary technology and practices of legal and media
domains.

THE TELEVISED COURT (I)

Shaeda Isani and Geoffrey Sykes (―Forensic Mediation‖) present an
unusual case study about the representation of a coroner‘s court, as received
and interpreted by French law students. The contrast, however, is not between
non-recorded actual proceedings and media programs, but that which arises
when in-house court video can be compared to produced works. The subject of
inquiry is why law students seem more analytic and comfortable with scripted
coronial events, yet adverse to and apparently detached from footage of actual
professional activities. The study is complicated by the lack of familiarity of
French students with the coronial court, that is not present in their country.
The subject of inquiry opens up a discourse about the status and production
values associated with mass media representations, compared with the
actuality of court events and their more informal video recording.
However clear and researched these decades-long issues of law and media
might appear, the implications of any study of media and law in recent years
cannot be identified or simplified so readily. The inter-relation of
representational and presentational depictions of legal subject matters, has
become more fluid, in terms of genres of program, media technology, changes
in access by selected jurisdictions, and in particular by the use of media within
legal processes and courts, for purposes such as administration, interview and
evidence.
One explanation of the boundary that seems to prevail between courts and
television can be in terms of an incommensurability of media forms. However
theatrical aspects of court performance might appear, its fundamental structure
can be regarded as being rhetorical, linguistic and logical, and different to