Page 14 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Introduction – ―Mediating Mediation‖ 5

attention through the close up camera lens. Regular public attendees become
‗social actors‘, or de facto media performers, much as audience members can
become players in a game or questioners for a panel, in a television studio.
Does this focus on the audience, normally passively secreted and partitioned in
a court, contribute to or diminish the hearing? The subject matter seems
distinct yet entirely relevant to any query about discretionary access of media
to courts: how many cameras, what kind of production values, how much
director‘s control? White employs a variety of interdisciplinary
communication methodologies to address these innovative questions.
The chapter raises the historical and theoretical status and role of the
public audience to a court proceeding, as spectators, witnesses or collaborators
in the event. The chapter can be seen as inviting wider, historically based
inquiry into the changed role of the public in a hearing, due to the effects of
media. However reticent one might feel about some directions of this example,
the example does illustrate some of the remarkable if unexpected similarities
between a court and a television studio, and how effortlessly one can be
transformed into the other.
The visual/verbal dichotomy that might have separated the two arenas
overlooks the quite verbal qualities of presenters, actors, anchors, readers,
promoters, in the artificial and hermetic space of a studio. The intimate yet
formal qualities of conversation and delivery in this space can be configured
quite readily as television drama or performance, as Judge Judy readily
reminds.
To some extent, televised events such as the Diana hearing follow on from
and help resolve the long-standing problematic nature of media-law relations.
They are not distinct, but typify developments within their professional
practices. However, a new factor has emerged that has the potential to
transform the professional practice of both media and law, and the
fundamental relations between them. This factor is media technology. The so-
called digital revolution, commencing in the mid 90‘s, has produced a new
generation of affordable, portable and efficient equipment and methods, to
enable the capture, storage, editing and transmission of messages.
In retrospect, it can seem that for several decades the issues of law and
media practice were very much determined by the nature of the technology of
media as much as its genres, professional expectation and industry needs.
Studio equipment (camera, editing, tapes) was expensive, and was based on
linear, real time capture or copying of events directly onto analogue recording
material (videotape or film). The transmission of produced programs required
access and licensing of a finite public resource – aerial broadcast bandwidth.