The Media as a Judicial and Police Resource

Abstract

This article examines how media reports of police court trials played an important discursive role in the workings of summary justice and the emergence of the policed society in Scotland in the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the dominant messages that trial coverage conveyed were laden with middle-class social and cultural assumptions concerning the accessibility, usefulness and fairness of the courts, and the character and guilt of the accused. Above all, the reports spoke to the intrinsic value of lay magistrates as paternal agents of community conflict resolution and police courts and, more subtly, the police as firm but trustworthy levers of urban discipline.