Page 75 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

66 Christina Spiesel

as behind them. In the early days of nineteenth century photography, there was
a lot of social concern about people taking pictures in public of unwilling
subjects, even prior to the development of photojournalism [Jay]. The
expectation of privacy has eroded – or we have all become participants.
Photography has both escaped from its referents and escaped from the
constraints of social boundaries. Probably inevitably, people are using
available camera technologies to document abuses of power by those in
authority and are thereby providing an alternative record of events. Francis
Ford Coppola‘s 1974 film The Conversation explored the beginning of this
social change.
Police and other enforcement authorities are responding now by going
after cameras demanding that people surrender their equipment, erase their
memory, otherwise cease and desist exercising their legal rights to photograph
in public [Schneier]. When not hostile to photography, the police are using
cameras as public relations weapons themselves. They may release their own
or ―official‖ surveillance video of events in response to people‘s posting their
videos on the Internet to frame the debate themselves or to try to head off the
unofficial version acquiring a social consensus. In some jurisdictions, police
are asking citizens to post evidence of crime on special websites [NYC_311].
See for example the TSA posting of its own surveillance footage to counter the
story of a disgruntled passenger [WUSA9.COM].
Courts will have to sort out different versions of evidentiary video; they
will have to be interpreting what is shown and can be known from often
fragmentary recording of bits of reality in different degrees of resolution and,
finally, all participants may come to the court having seen all kinds of video
that won‘t be admitted at all but which may, nevertheless, influence their
judgments. In the ―olden days‖, television would broadcast information about
events that could wind up in the courts but television had gatekeepers.
Virtually free and self-selecting video posting has changed all that. Indeed in
some recent cases in the United States jurors were found to be using their hand
held devices to surf the World Wide Web for additional information pertaining
to their cases. [Schwartz]
Photography has become a ―weapon‖ in info-wars carried out by opinion
makers and critics, whether photo-op (as in the recent ill-advised fly-over of
lower Manhattan of Air Force One) or the photoshopped (as were Iranian

missiles, the wounded in Palestine) [Wald] [Morris].
We are learning to be skeptical of all official stories. Taser video enters
this pictorial landscape of uncertainty. Will it seem to be especially probative