Page 24 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Introduction – ―Mediating Mediation‖ 15

supplementary on-line information and two way exchange of messages with
audiences. The public and commercial dimensions of broadcasting need to be
re-legitimated actively through negotiation with new media.
The implementation of media systems in legal domains, whether taser
guns to police, or in-house television in courts, cannot be assessed only
according to their effects, but also in terms of the infra-structure that finances,
owns and controls them. The effects of media on client and professional
behaviour can be held as a supplement to a more systemic understanding of
the changing jurisdictional and political agendas of law as a macro
organisation in a modern commercial and political state. The fluid and
perplexed world of state legislation, in response to security, environmental,
economic and social change, invites another perspective on media content.
Mass media and film do not only represent the behaviours and internal world
of courts, in fictional and realist modes, but participate through news, current
affairs and fiction, in agenda-setting discourses that parallel and even
anticipate the research, decision and law-making functions of courts.
Several questions – historical, philosophical, legal, semiotic – that are
implicitly raised in this volume, are questions that await further specialist
publication. This volume contains within it an argument worthy of greater
elaboration. It is fair to say that most writing on the effects of media on law
share a presumption that legal domains are late or slow adaptors of media
practices. In terms of a diffusion theory of media innovations, the law is not a
champion or key liaison in new practice. This volume begins to suggest the
terms in which the law, in content and practice, can contribute a more
substantial and leading edge role in terms of contemporary and emerging
media processes.