Page 118 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

―Your Words Against Mine‖: States of Exception… 109

in the ―serious‖ venues, cannot be made without taking a perspective and with
the choice of words determining interpretive frames suggestive of privileged
interpretations.
If we look a bit closer at the accounts given by the media in Excerpts 1-4,
we have already noted that far more attention is given to the woman and her
personal and physical characteristics than to the man. I suggested that this
might be explained by a decision on behalf of the media to explore the
characteristics of the known person rather than to engage in a description of
the anonymous man. This might be a reasonable explanation, but the effect is
that we learn a lot more about her communicative and social behavior, about
her personal style, and her physical features. Her attitude of toughness is
quoted directly it was spoken. All these facts can be regarded as more or less
innocent iterations of what is already publically known, but it can also be
regarded as building up a frame for interpreting the event in a particular way,
namely of making the woman appear guilty. We learn that she is physically
strong (she plays rugby on the national level), she is unusually fearless in a
physical and verbal sense, she can be very straightforward in her way of
speaking, and she is deliberately fearless and provocative in the face of power.
Meanwhile, we learn nothing whatsoever about the physical condition of the
man, neither anything about his verbal behavior, his psychological fitness, or
his relation to power. What we learn is that he is a doorkeeper and it is also
indicated that he is highly educated. The frame for interpreting the man and his
role in the event supports his version of the event: the colored intellectual
doorkeeper was hit and discriminated against by the brusque white rugby
woman. This implicit frame runs counter to the stance of neutrality which is
symbolically marked by the use of the expression ―your words against mine‖.
This interpretation could be made based on the information about the
contestants, although the expression ―your words against mine‖ serve to
counter any such bias in reporting.
We might talk of the non-legitimacy of media as a legal institution
[Friedman 1989]. From a legal perspective the media has an unwanted status
as a negative institution potentially intervening in the proper legal institutions
and their procedures. Obviously, the functions of the media are not altogether
negative, but the media maintains a number of crucial functions in the state,
most prominently as ―the fourth estate of democracy‖. It is often repeated that
no one can be sentenced in the media; that the media should not be a stage for
trials; that the only legitimate context for sentencing is the court; that nobody
is guilty until this is proven by the court; etc. A recurring claim in legal culture
is thus that the administration, mediation and decision making related to legal