Page 12 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Introduction – ―Mediating Mediation‖ 3

cinemagraphic or televisual language. The perception can be made tacitly and
quickly by both legal and media practitioners, and can be elaborated
theoretically, in terms of theories of language, signs and medium – for
example, law is mainly verbal in its expository style, while television is mainly
non-verbal or visual. The contrast can be evaluated, with the court seen to
have a sobriety and dignity lacking in the messages of media. This evaluation
can be part of a law reform agenda – that by identifying and appraising non-
verbal aspects of legal processes one might begin to change and reform
traditional ways of legal practice.
Nevertheless, the traditional, rhetorical way of regarding the business of
law, by its practitioners, has certainly resulted in a fundamental distrust of
methods of narration, production, presentation, argument and audience
reception of mass media messages, that from the legal aspects can be
responsible for the substitution of entertainment and visual effects in place of
the precise rhetorical practice of legal argument. The suspicion is increased
when media broadcasters do not only seek to represent legal process, but to
substitute and compete in decision-making roles. Investigative and current
affairs programs can readily assume quasi-legal roles of arbitration that can
rival and even interrupt those of formal judicial domains. The relationship
between law and media can be said to be inter-jurisdictional.
Metaphorically and pragmatically, one can speak of a boundary or wall
that has been built between the main activities of mass media and legal
practice, across which participants on either side gaze, compete, envy,
criticise, suspect and reproduce each other. Yet if one can speak of a wall in
the past tense, then increasingly that membrane has become pervious, more a
transition zone for dynamic interdependent relations and hybrid practices.
Some examples of hybrid events that transgress any neat separation of law
and media can be found. Television crews with portable equipment are finding
practical access to police and detection events, crime scenes and out of court
street interviews. Programs such as Judge Judy and Divorce Court site actual
sitting courts in the broadcast studio, or else transform a courtroom into a
studio. Given selected jurisdictional precedents and participant permissions,
and the role of actual judges as arbitrators, it is possible to replicate, or
stylistically cannibalise and appropriate, entire court proceedings, for unedited
real time broadcast, inside a television studio. The boundary of law and media
is shifted and collapsed by television producers, entirely on their own terms.
The staging of television courts invites wider comparison of courts and
studios. Put to a broadcast crunch, a conceptual synchrony of court and studio
emerges and apparent differences between the main arenas of media and law