Page 114 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

―Your Words Against Mine‖: States of Exception… 105

difficulty concerning interpretation is a general condition of all post facto
accounts which determines first order testimonies and second order
witnessing, as well as attempts to make disinterested reportage or analysis.
When I now resume the task of describing a few more details of the case, I run
into the same risk of representation as the media and the court when they make
their accounts. I note this as a reminder about methodological reflexivity.
First of all, some more information about the main actors can be given.
This is basically what we learn about the contestants from the media accounts:
The man, who is most often anonymous, is of Iranian descent, working part
time as a doorkeeper at the restaurant Crazy Horse. According to the accounts
in the media, he is also an intern working in a North Stockholm general
hospital. The woman has had the position of Chairman for the youth party
SSU since almost a year before the event. It is striking that we learn
substantially more about the woman than about the man from the accounts.
This may or may not be explained by her being a more official person about
whom more things are generally known by the public. Her political style, for
instance, is described by ―a leading person in the party‖ as ―straight and
tough‖: ―She talks without ornaments, a practical and forcible politician‖
[Dagens Nyheter 31/1/06]. The woman has a background as a rugby player in
Sweden‘s national team. When she accepted the role as Chairman, she made
an analogy with sports, characterizing politics as a ―tough game‖ in analogy
with rugby (ibid). Upon accepting office, she promised that the youth party
SSU would be ―a blowtorch in the ass of the party‖ (ibid). She came to office
at a time when the youth party had been seriously challenged by a series of
scandals involving irregular accounting practices, which led to an immediate
decrease in the number of members.
It is certainly difficult to describe exactly what happened that night at the
Crazy Horse, and to determine exactly who said what to whom, and in what
emotional key and with what physical force. Obviously, it is the object of the
court proceedings to try to determine the extent to which these actions
happened or not. The very indeterminacy of the events is also what is behind
the expression at focus, ―your words against mine‖. The accounts are
contested and the media apparently do their best to report about this in what
they assume is a balanced way, although any kind of representation is always
more or less partial.
With the risk of running cynical, I would say that what really happened is
not the issue in this particular analytic context. For the court proceedings it is
certainly important, but for the purposes of analysis it is not. It is not the case
because we cannot from this position know anything about what took place