Page 30 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

―Mediated Forensics: From Classroom to Courtroom‖ 21

didactic or pedagogical point about the use of fiction or role play in class, as
opposed to documentaries, as a source of information about actual sites and
practice, must also be balanced against the vogue for reality television style,
which confounds any clear separation of fiction and factual style. The hybrid
modes of ―reality TV‖ can indeed be known as ―faction‖, in its composite of
fiction and fact.
Such an affirmative account in fact is presumed by producers and
practitioners of television and by teachers of the practice. There is
considerable stress on the persuasive and qualitative skills in good presentation
and journalism, and critical discernment about good and poor television drama
is certainly made. At a more theoretical and academic level, the legacy of
social criticism of mass media, typical in the Birmingham tradition of cultural
studies and the Frankfurt School of media studies, have continued, only to be
eclipsed by an argument for the redundancy of broadcast television in the face
of emerging, digital social media. [Lewis, pp. 87-89]. Without reappraising
critical traditions of mass media studies, these critical positions are now
validated by the growth of minority, web-based interaction text and video
media.
This chapter suggests that discounting of television theory, and practice, is
premature, and that re-evaluation of paradigms of television aesthetics is
required, to comprehend more fully the history of the medium and also to
provide a conceptual framework for locating a television style within the
diversified world of mixed media. Such evaluation will help explain the
isolated example from law-related classroom didactics , and also locate it in a
wider context of media and communicative practices, both within wider
society and potentially and actually with courts and legal domains.

“THE PRESENTATIONAL PARADOX”

The argument that will be innovatively brokered in this paper, and argued
theoretically, can be termed the ―Presentational Paradox of Broadcast
Television‖, or more broadly general documentary video practices. We could
also adopt the more generalised term ―televisual‖ to denote a more flexible
approach to the study of television style [Deming]. However this might
encourage a post-television paradigm, when the problem to be discussed
should be located within the conventional practice of broadcast media as much
as the recent growth of reality television styles, many of them about police and