Media Effects on Jurors Written by Edith Greene

Media Effects

The academic article Media Effects On Jurors, written by Edith Greene, examines the impact on jurors of exposure to media coverage of legal issues. According to Greene, the information and opinions from the media sources including newspaper, radio news and television programs, and the popular social network applications like Facebook, Twitter and so on, may have impacts on the juror’s decision.

With the purpose of exploring the potential effects of the media on juror and jury decision making, this article firstly lists a real unrelated case to discuss whether there exists influence of trial-related publicity on juror and in this specific case the answer is positive. To be more specific, the publicized events happened both nationally and internationally which are reported via mass media may engender a hostile atmosphere towards particular defendants. Subsequently the article lists some cases and experiments with the purpose of exploring how is the legal system represented in the media. The exploration is quite detail-oriented, including the analysis of courtroom participants, the criminal justice system, with theories listed and experiments carried on to support the argument. Finally this article notices that on the one hand, the insurance industry advertisement has influence on juror’s damage award. And heavy viewing of pornography also affects the juror’s final decisions. With purely theories, the article develops its argument on these two topics.

Generally speaking, there are more than one methods adopted in this article to develop the argument -- examples, case study, experiment and the theories. And the article finally reach a conclusion that it is true that media can affect the process of jury decision making. Though the media is unlikely to determine the final trial results, the effects are incremental nowadays. Therefore, the whole society, especially the jurors should show close concern about generalized media effects.