Mass-mediated ‘open justice’: court and judicial reports in the Press in England and Wales

Abstract

The need for courts and the judiciary to operate in public and for their activities to be open to public scrutiny is a well-established goal of liberal democracies. One of its recent policy manifestations is in debates about confidence in the justice system and initiatives designed to improve confidence. In the majority of cases, public scrutiny of court and judicial activity relies upon the media. Reports in regional and national newspapers have long been – and research suggests continue to be – an important source of information, shaping public knowledge and facilitating public scrutiny of the justice system. Unlike in some other common law jurisdictions, in the UK there is almost no scholarship on these representations, past or present. The result is that little is known about the representation of courts and the judiciary in Press reports. The aim of this paper is to take a first step towards changing that state of affairs. It uses a data set made up of 205 contemporary newspaper reports of court and judicial activity. These come from a sample of 24 daily newspapers: 10 national newspapers and 14 from the regions. All were published on Thursday 16 February 2012, an unexceptional day in the life of the justice system and the Press. The modest goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of this snapshot of the courts and the judiciary in the Press in England and Wales.