ABSTRACT
The mass media are routinely noted for their problematic relationship with the legal truth and the extent to which they are in the business of embellishing the law as well as consistently distorting it. The most widely studied examples are undoubtedly news reporting of high-profile trials, the everpopular courtroom drama and crime fiction. However, the media’s engagement with law cannot be reduced to sensational headlines, blockbuster movies and bestsellers alone. It clearly has a much wider remit. Thus in this Chapter I seek to highlight how various media outlets, such as problem pages and advice columns in magazines, radio phone-ins and increasingly also internet websites, act as a prolific source of popular legal advice. The example of legal advice media is instructive in much the same way as reality television is (see Chapter 3): firstly, it has the ability to evince the mutually constitutive dynamics of media and everyday legal experience because legal advice media explicitly seek to address the everyday legal problems of audiences and, secondly, it also provides strong evidence of how the audience is constructed in media discourse as actively seeking legal information, corroborating the active audience model explored in the previous chapter.
