Page 37 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

28 Shaeda Isani and Geoffrey Sykes

physical over the intellectual and the moral, and a general aversion towards
complexity‖. [Dahlgren, p. 418]. It follows that production bias can be tested
against the reality and immediate knowledge of actual trials and forensic
processes: that television itself becomes an object, not a means, of scrutiny
[Bignall, pp. 210-225] [Fiske, pp. 49-52]. Programs are analysed and
evaluated against social truths, about gender, race or politics: it is assumed that
some non-manipulated benchmark of social reality exists by which the
constructed representations of media programming can be assessed, both in
style and content. The phenomenological dimensions of television that this
chapter has addressed then become tools of persuasion and control, disguising
the tacit function of media to create politically and commercially motivated
representations of social reality.

CULTIVATION THEORIES

On the other hand, ―cultivation‖ or socialisation theories [Blake, pp. 79-
91] stress the basic sociological and discursive function of media in
maintaining social hegemony and identity. The function, structures and rituals
of media narratives can be much larger and more significant than glamorising
aspects of reality that would otherwise be unpalatable or complicated.
Notwithstanding their capacity and function to sensationalise and entertain,
television and film will continue to present discourses and knowledge about
law-making that potentially rival or even compete with the proceedings of
courts.
Two cultivation theories can be mentioned which are applicable to some
extent to our example. Forum theories stress how television can ―work
through‖ sensitive issues, such as a coronial investigation, how its multiple
camera, flexible production style encourages ―transitory glimpses, preliminary
meanings, multiple frameworks, explanations and narrative structures‖
[Dalgren, p. 417]. The interpersonal, socialising modes of television style are
means to reorient private citizens – and the individual students – towards a
shared public court culture, in ways that might be restricted in the formal
modes of an actual court. Television allows forms of engagement which
facilitate functions of civic culture and public debate. Presenters are
representational in a political sense, engaging and disposing private and
individual audience members in the cultural formation of the public sphere.
We need appropriate methodological tools – structural, systemic,
communicative – to approach and understand such collective and civic