News Making in the Trial Courts

• NCJ Number: 89348
• Author(s): R E Drechsel
• Date Published: 1983
• Length: 174 pages
• Sale Source: Longman Inc
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Longman professional studies in political communication and policy

Annotation

This book examines the most common criticisms of press court coverage, summarizes the judicial newsmaking process, reviews the history of American judicial reporting, and presents the results of a study of the interaction of court personnel with reporters covering Minnesota State courts.

Abstract

Media coverage of the judicial branch has been criticized for failing to give the public the amount and type of information it needs to understand and critically evaluate the judiciary. Coverage has also been criticized as often superficial if not misleading or inaccurate. Journalists have been criticized for being inadequately trained in law and the judicial process, so that they are unable to separate the significant from the sensational, unable competently to monitor the judiciary, and unable to understand what they are observing and recording. A study of issues related to these criticisms involved historical research, a case study based on direct observation of a fulltime court reporter for a metropolitan daily newspaper in Minnesota, and a questionnaire survey of State court judges, court clerks, attorneys, and daily newspaper reporters in Minnesota. The historical study challenged the view that early American newspapers failed to cover local news and warned against the misconception that 19th-century court reporting was all sensational, and it traced the growing use of diverse news sources and the change in news-gathering techniques. The case study revealed how important some judicial sources are in determining what becomes news, how much chance seems to be involved in what receives press attention, and how very little information emerges from the court system. The survey research produced heretofore unavailable descriptive information about the information for which judicial sources are asked and the types they will provide, the frequency of tips, the ways in which judicial sources use the news media, the frequency of overt reporter-source disagreement, and the nature of sources' complaints about court news reporting. Implications of these findings are considered, and suggestions for future research are offered. Chapter footnotes and about 170 bibliographic entries are provided, along with a subject index.