Page 115 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

106 Per-Anders Forstorp

and our interest lies mainly not therein, but in exploring the potential meanings
and interpretations of a certain expression. This is where we risk cynicism.
The expression in its various contexts of use conveys particular attitudes in
relation to the task of finding and validating facts which the media (and later
one of the contestants, cf. below) assume.
Another methodological difficulty concerning the reproduction of a
reasonably fair version of the event is that the accounts are contested and that
all the witnesses brought in are supporting either one of the two versions.
There is no aim towards consensus on which a fair representation could be
built. We thus enter into the fuzzy domain of claims and counter claims,
accounts and counter accounts provided by the actors and disseminated by the
media. Here are some examples: The woman claims that the doorkeeper
―jumped‖ her after she questioned the acquittal of her friend from the bar. In
her report to the police, as well as in her formal legal report, she accuses him
for physically abusing her with a baton and yelling sexist words at her. The
doorkeeper, on the other hand, claims that the fight started when the bartender
refused to serve the group more drinks. He claims that the woman acted
―aggressively‖ and that she yelled sexist and racist remarks at him. According
to him, she also threw a fist into his face as well as attempted to take a
strangle-hold on him. The paper reports her allegedly yelling ―jävla
svartskalle‖ at him. This expression contains a swear word and a derogatory
name used for immigrants based on the black color of their hair (and skin). As
one of the newspapers succinctly summarizes the event: ―What actually
happened at the bar is still unclear‖ [Dagens Nyheter 30/1/06]. This summary
made by the newspaper is also valid in this particular analytic context, with the
important difference that I am more inclined to explore the potentialities of
this interpretive gap and its legal and non-legal implications, rather than in
finding out ―what actually happened‖.
The employees at the bar brought action against the woman. With her
celebrity status attorney, the woman responded by making a counter action a
few days later. The procedures in district court started half a year later. In
December of the same year, the judicial decision sentenced the woman to pay
fines on all counts. She resigned from her post as Chairman and has since then,
without success, been trying to appeal against the sentence.
In the following two parts of the analysis, we will explore these
interpretations of the expression through the communicative strategies that are
used. The analysis is based only on a small segment of popular legal culture,
as well as tiny bits and pieces from the newspapers. For the purposes of a more
comprehensive analysis, however, we would need to explore also TV and