Page 23 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

14 Geoffrey Sykes

FILM AND DISCOURSE:
A CASE IN INTERNATIONAL LAW

Shea Esterling‘s chapter (―Indiana Jones and the Illicit Trafficking and
Repatriation of Cultural Objects‖) might at first seem like a supplement to the
ones that precede it. On second thought, in its macro and structural attention to
issues of international law and ethnography, it can be seen to represent a role
for media content that is foundational to the more phenomenological
perspectives of previous chapters. How the law is represented, in professional
and public shows and films, is not merely one of supplementary re-telling of
narratives that have their own legitimacy and procedures somehow
hermetically separate from media. In its traditional and transformed practice
the law in content becomes a form of media discourse. The structures,
boundaries (national and otherwise) and patterns of signification, regulation
and jurisdiction need to be continually investigated and publicly and politically
legitimated. On the other pole of social media, the large theatrical and
cinemagraphic productions have the capacity to tell and present public and
collective myths and stories, that do more than reiterate but correspond and
synergise the conception and landscape of public law. The law will continue to
redefine its public responsibilities and roles through a dialogue with and
implementation of the full range of new media opportunities and methods.

CONCLUSION - SOME OUTSTANDING ISSUES

Just when new even exciting negotiations of the relationship of public
broadcasting and law might seem possible, a new boundary or membrane
opens up between both of these public spheres, and what has come to be called
new or social media. Old political and philosophical debates of the individual
and society are rearticulated in media forms that potentially challenge and
transform both media and legal cultures. New media theorists can
adventurously talk of the death of television, and even the birth of new
participatory politics, yet what prognosis, reformist or conservative, is offered
for the potential impact of social media on legal processes?
One thing we can be sure, that prophecies about the death of the public
sphere, whether in television, law or political organisation, seem premature
and ill-informed. Television has reinvented itself in terms of trans- media
strategies, that embrace and syphon broadcast programming into websites and