ABSTRACT
There is undeniably a sense of annoyance – despair even – among legal academics and senior judges at what they see as the mass media’s iron grip on the popular legal imagination. Simply put, their fear is that a persistent stream of distorted and sensationalised media portrayals is crowding out sober legal fact and may ultimately prove corrosive of law’s authority and autonomy. The urgency of the language used in books, articles and judicial speeches is a measure of such concerns. An imagery of crisis, collapse and blurred boundaries (e.g. Garapon 1996; Stachenfeld and Nicholson 1996; Nobles and Schiff 2000; Sherwin 2000; Haltom and McCann 2004) – which incidentally would itself not look out of place in a breaking news headline – serves to underline the acutely tense relationship between law and the media. This holds particularly true for the way in which the media portray the administration of justice. In Britain, Lord Woolf (2003), the former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, asked not so long ago: ‘Should the media and the judiciary be on speaking terms?’, while Lord Justice Wall (2006: 19), a senior Court of Appeal judge, has called for a ‘modus vivendi’ between the judiciary and the press to encourage more responsible reporting. Quite wisely perhaps, he immediately cautioned: ‘But we should not expect too much. . . . We may try to raise the level of the debate but we must recognise that we may not succeed.’ The current Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, recently hit out at some British media for their personal attacks on judges:
Recently some sectors of the media have chosen to select some judges for personal attacks that have been intemperate, offensive and unfair. A judge who is the subject of such an attack cannot answer back. All here will, I know, share my sympathy for the victims of this abuse, and not just for them. Some of us can grow thick skins, but it is deeply distressing for family members to see those that they love and respect pilloried in the press.
