Page 38 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

―Mediated Forensics: From Classroom to Courtroom‖ 29

functions, and seek to optimise, critically assess and help produce works, with
jurisprudential consequence, in terms of their contribution to public debate and
democratic society.
Palmer, for instance, looks at the emergence of the Judge TV as a social
actor and media presenter, comparing the authority and role of the Judge TV
with that of the talk-show host and a court judge. Palmer discusses how TV
can be compared with other forums and systems of justice which, while
separate and sometimes competing, work towards a sense of collective
governance in society [Palmer].
One further cultivation theory analyses deeper, more diachronic or
unchanging patterns or structures, of social or legal signification that recur in
individual film and television works [Harman]. In a deeper sense it is possible
that what is at stake in our example is a play of national and cultural
boundaries, whose differences operate at or in media systems and productions
as much as they do in jurisdictional practice. What is distant in a jurisdictional,
geographic and cultural sense from French students is also close for audiences
from common law countries. Underpinning the subjective and social reception
of the forensic programs, there are deeper structural and cultural patterns at
play that set parameters to individual experience and interpretation.

CONCLUSION

It is tempting to depict the conundrum that commenced this paper in terms
of competing sources of knowledge and perception of forensics processes.
What is at stake is not the translation or representation of subject matter,
manipulative or otherwise, but two mainly separate versions of the forensic
practice which potentially confuse students, who are in a transitional state
between theorectical, televisual and experiential professional knowledge, and
potentially confused about different styles. Rather than being between media
and reality, the difference between television and court can be labelled as
being between media forms, or being ‗transmedia‘ by nature [Jenkins, pp. 8-
9]. The students are engaged in a process of translation and comparison
between two sources of information.
Like television studios, courtrooms are constructed rhetorically in the
visual and everyday material and subject they present and represent. The court,
both in its current form without electronic cameras, and in potential form with
cameras, is in itself a mediated, controlled context. The problematic example
of student viewing of selected videos has been used as a line of inquiry to