Page 35 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

26 Shaeda Isani and Geoffrey Sykes

as Charles Peirce and Gilles Deleuze can assist in seeing the potential for
electronic forms of reasoning in digital media – a potential well envisaged in
the writings on legal semiotics by Roberta Kevelson [Sykes]. Such directions
can only be sketched here, but it is helpful and quite necessary to ask how the
form of implicit reasoning, by forensic professionals dealing with the graphic
footage watched by students, could best be represented in electronic media.
Would media and video always fall short of the full complement and line of
reasoning and argument that would accompany forensic analysis of visual
material?
One aside to the various perspectives in this paper is the phenomena of
police producing and presenting their own versions of crime scenes. Producers
of programs such as those mentioned as being popular with the French law
students have begun to provide material available as evidence within court
proceedings. To counter such produced video evidence, some American police
departments are beginning to produce and present their own version of events
– competing almost, on a trans-media basis, with the development of both
―viral‖ informal or citizen evidence, and produced television versions.
It would seem that progress in this area, of video usage in legal domains,
requires appropriate use of interdisciplinary and media theory, and
understanding of the medium of television and video generally. The
presentational paradox, that realism and information in a video medium
require intermediary commentary by appropriate presenters, on the one hand
seems at odds with the demands of real time, unmediated records of court
evidence. One of the principal roles of the judge in the common law
adversarial system is to guarantee that any court evidence, and it follows video
record of evidence, be unmediated. The judge is cast in a quasi director‘s role
that is quite at odds with the televisual techniques of a television director.
On the other hand, it is wrong to stress too much any opposition between
the ―natural‖ real world of the courtroom and the constructed world of
television. Court procedures are constructed, arguably, in more complex ways
than television depicts, and the constructed ways issues of reality and truth are
mediated are not entirely dissimilar to the rhetorical forms of television. In
both, presentational roles are present (panel host/ judge) and engage in indirect
interaction with other professionals (studio panel member/legal counsel) along
with social actors (studio audience, panel members/expert and everyday
witnesses).
The discussion of this example has focused on communicative and
phenomenological dimensions – of audience reception and interpretation. Yet
another perspective seems to be at play: the other side of the so-called