Page 31 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

22 Shaeda Isani and Geoffrey Sykes

coronial practice. So called reality TV is only the most recent of several layers
and modes of realism that have always been present in television style.
Camera crews are very mobile and accompany police on patrol and at
actual crime scenes. Reality television can play with and exploit the boundary
of realism and fiction, yet equally it represents an important re-negotiation of
realism in the media. The negotiation is more than a matter of style – a
plethora of issues, legal and procedural, regarding privacy, libel, defamation,
obtrusiveness, property and consent, are introduced, once the controlled
convenience of scripted drama is put aside. The production quality, including
lighting, multiple cameras, audio quality and tracking, would be hard to
reproduce in actual filming, especially within a court setting.
Despite its mass production and reception, televisual style has always
maintained a highly interpersonal and immediate format that constantly and
reflexively qualifies any potential for programs to become over-constructed
and artificial. That is, television itself has addressed the worst fears of its
critics, and adopted communicative practices that appeal to the critical
judgment and goodwill of audiences. This mode, called by Jeremy Butler
―expository‖, can be true of drama as well as non-fiction. Indeed, expository
style blurs any clear distinction between drama and non-fiction, as well as
between actor, presenter and social actor or everyday person, and helps
explains the hybrid form of ―reality‖ television [Butler, pp. 9-25] [Kavka].
There is no question that these communicative strategies can be abused.
However, until they are recognised, it is impossible to evaluate such abuse, or
understand the medium as a whole and plan its ongoing development into
areas such as court proceedings.
We label this revised approach to television style as presentational, or in
terms of answering one paradox by another, as the ‗Presentation Paradox of
Mass Media‘. The paradox resides in the following: what is mass and
homogenous is simultaneously intimate and interpersonal. The interpersonal
functions, we argue, have two dimensions: on screen, in the mediating role of
presenters, newsreaders, commentators and anchorpersons, and in terms of the
audience, in the distribution and iteration of received messages within a
discourse and talk about shows in a community. Geographically, despite the
wide dispersion of the broadcast signal, television works to preserve a sense of
a localised milieu – as if the presenters were present in the household living
rooms, and the studio accessible and nearby. Indeed, in the history of the
medium, television broadcasts were very much foot-printed by a localised
signal and station. It was only through aggregation and networking that the