Page 120 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

―Your Words Against Mine‖: States of Exception… 111

found that the public find journalists more trustworthy than politicians. People
do care about the media and what is expressed there. The media affects a
general recognition of moral, legal and political issues, an issue which
Friedman was quick to note in his analysis of popular legal culture. Extending
the definition of what constitutes legal culture, we can, following Friedman,
say that the media is part of a popular legal culture. This popular culture is not
sanctioned by the constitution as a legitimate arena for courting morality or
law but it is sanctioned as a social institution for the expression of social and
cultural norms. The media relates to the official legal culture, cautious not to
intervene in a way that is much too explicit. We can also note that the media
invents their own procedures and strategies for coping both with its non-
legitimate character and for still being able to express norms. These things
may be separated as reflected by the organization of journalistic work, but in
practice the boundaries are fuzzier. While this may be understandable from the
point of view of the legitimate legal processes, its institutions as well as its
advocates, we also know that enormous intellectual and emotional investments
are made in the mediation of legal processes in this unwanted popular sense.
Popular legal culture thrives on its unrecognized and unauthorized status as a
relevant legal realm. Even more so, popular legal culture seems to invent its
own procedures, rationales, theories and vocabularies supporting this
mediation of legal processes, in itself institutionalized in the public sphere but
differentiated from the core legal institutions.
In Marcus Daniel‘s historical account Scandal & Civility: Journalism and
the Birth of American Democracy [Daniel] it is shown that standards of
journalistic objectivity date to the Nineteenth Century. Before then, the whole
point of the media was in fact to explicitly demonstrate a point of view. ―The
Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Men‘s Opinions‖, Benjamin
Franklin wrote in his 1731 Apology for Printers. Franklin‘s job was not only to
find the facts, it was to publish a sufficient range of opinions: ―Printers are
educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought
equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when
Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the
latter‖ [Daniel].