Page 18 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Introduction – ―Mediating Mediation‖ 9

video as evidence, all legal practitioners need to be literate in the language of
media. A simple naïve presumption of truthfulness inherent in the video
medium will not go far in evaluating the merit and meaning of security or hand
held amateur shots tendered as essential evidence during hearings.
The boundary of public law and media might be capable of negotiated
survival but it could be envisaged that the flood of citizens‘ media forms might
bring any boundary between the law and media down altogether. The
preceding statement might seem rash, but it is in accord with the aspirations
and expectations of many new media advocates. In areas of politics,
commerce, and commercial media, there is an uncanny idealism about the
transformative effects of new digital media to reform traditional practices. It is
true less attention has been given to the effects of new media on legal practice,
than it has on politics, or mass media, yet one might wonder why such
attention has not occurred. Both political and television culture can prove more
resilient to change, able to control and manipulate new media within their own
traditional fabric. Yet the law remains a relatively unknown field for inquiry
about the effects of media.

REGULATING PRIVACY

More than ever substantive media law must define and help clarify the
subject matter of media practice, and philosophical implications on social and
personal identity. David Rolph (―The Mechanical Eye‖) shows how the
development of direct privacy protection in the United Kingdom and Australia
involves an implicit, profound but unacknowledged epistemological shift in
the treatment of photography. The common law previously treated the human
eye and the camera as equivalent – the presumption being ―what one can see
one can photograph‖ – with property rights and trespass setting the main
restrictions to this natural right. Increasingly however the human eye and the
camera are treated as different. This chapter argues that it is only by making
this epistemological (and legal) shift that one can move from a position where
there is no wrong in looking or seeing (and, by extension, photographing) to a
position where photographing is viewed as an act distinct from looking or
seeing, and photographing, recording and disseminating images can be viewed
from an ethical and legal perspective. Media practice involves a redefining of
the public sphere and individual rights and David Rolph makes an invaluable
and erudite examination of complex and significant implications of the
practice of new media in our society.