Page 29 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

20 Shaeda Isani and Geoffrey Sykes

For example, Johnstone outlines how television access into the Australian
court systems has been ―slow and piecemeal, with Australia falling behind
Canadian and New Zealand initiatives in this area.‖ [Johnstone]. A similar
comparison can be made between experiments in access in the United States,
and the even more conservative approach in France and other European
countries. European students might have less familiarity or literacy generally
with documentary video accounts of courts.
Yet here the paradox of the reception of the coronial documentary video
turns again. If the success of mass media programming is due to its
representation of areas of society that audiences already find of interest, why
are French students not more intrigued when presented on a privileged basis
with actual professional footage of thanatological investigation? Why is the
actual or real time footage not preferred to edited, scripted and produced
fictional presentations of the same subject matter?
To solve the paradox we need to turn from legal to media theory, to do
some quick thinking within the body of media theory – in particular of the
reception of television programs, and the style and genre of programming.
There is a long-standing argument for the opposition of media production and
natural or real life situation, whereby the production process manipulates or
distorts the qualities and truthfulness of actual situations. This presumption has
been held in various media theories since the early days of television, in part
as a result of the response of propaganda on film during WWII. The so-called
―hypodermic needle‖ theory suggested that the reception of messages in
passive mass audiences was almost unconscious, much like the effects of
wartime propaganda. From the early 1950‘s, advertisers and broadcasters
sought to exploit the constructed, artificial nature of television style, and its
potential homogeneous reception by mass audiences, to their advantage. At the
same time psychologists and regulators sought to study and control the worse
perceived effects of mass inculcation of audiences, especially in areas of
violence and morality [Lewis, pp. 83-86] [McQuail, pp. 33-60].
To account for the coronial paradox, another more general paradox about
the reception and style of television programs needs to be argued, one that is at
variance with the negative presumption about the manipulative effects of
messages on audience understanding of reality and truth. What is required is a
more positive account of the reception of television genres that will explain
why the students in question preferred source information about coronial
procedures from fictionally produced rather than from documentary sources. If
there is a preference for fiction as opposed to factual representation, then
fiction must be serving mimetic and abductive thinking about reality. Any