Page 36 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

―Mediated Forensics: From Classroom to Courtroom‖ 27

Presentational Paradox. Television does not merely reproduce or represent the
actual working of courts, but presents a rival, constructed version of legal
discourse and events. Television shares a tradition of film, in the construction
of meta-narratives, that can offer claims on social justice and values that can
seek to rival, in terms of law making, the legitimating function of courts. The
perceptual and epistemological gaps in everyday public knowledge of legal
systems can lead not only to curiosity about those actual systems but also
about the substitutional role of presentation of justice on mass media and
cinematographic narratives.
This construction of alternative, part fictional and even mythologised
narratives can be regarded as being manipulative. Critical theorists would
share with many legal professionals a critique of the constructed and
manipulative quality of mass media narratives. The transforming processes are
implicit to audiences, hence the entire process of capture, editing and
production is material, which being manipulated, is subject to suspicion and
distrust compared to some primary or authentic notion of unmediated
communication.
On one account such manipulative rendition can be normalised into a set
of genres, often fictionalised, and literary in nature, whereby the images of
everyday life are glamorised with typified sequences of narrative and
character. The public has a psychological and entertainment fascination with
morbidity in various genres, and shows like CSI need to be explained in the
contexts of generalised genres that long precede the particular attention to
morgues and coronial investigation. The entertaining effect of detection and
court genres of television programming, it can be argued, gives an imaginary
or virtual quality to representations of actual situations, and makes difficult
subject matter, such as in coronial work, more tolerable and accepted. The
dilution of the gruesome by thriller, mystery and romance narrative montage
makes the mise-en-scene of individual scenes, however graphic, more
acceptable.
The reception of graphic body images, according to this narrative or
structural account of television programs, needs to be assessed alongside the
depiction of violence and horror in feature films, using evaluative techniques
quite apart from issues of social or legal realism. Fictionalisation of everyday
reality would be regarded by the Frankfurt or Critical Theory School, or the
French media critic Paul Virillo, as a form of false consciousness or virtual
reality, a product of commercial consumerism. According to this analysis, our
assessment of the students‘ response or conditioning by mass media should be
mainly negative, a result of putting ―style over substance, the emotional and