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The Ethics of Court Reporting: Storytelling in the Courtroom and Newsroom

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Football and Sexual Crime, from the Courtroom to the Newsroom

Abstract

Using reporting on the committal and trial of rugby league star Brett Stewart as a case study, this chapter explores complex questions of ethics in court reporting on sexual violence. From interviews with court reporters, I identify two main approaches to ethics: one which sees the court reporter’s role as reproducing what happens in court and relies on a traditional view of journalistic objectivity, and the other seeing a responsibility to ‘protect’ victims and not overemphasise problematic defence strategies. I propose a theory of meaning-making for court reporting, showing how genre conventions grant particular kinds of significance to events and speech acts. Subtle discursive and narrative strategies privilege either the prosecution or defence’s narrative, portraying the defendant or complainant as ‘guilty’ even without overt sensationalising or vilification.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Parts of this chapter draw on ‘News Media on Trial: Towards a Feminist Ethics of Reporting Footballer Sexual Assault Trials’ (Waterhouse-Watson 2016b).

  2. 2.

    See Waterhouse-Watson (2013, 16–18) for further discussion of narratology and media narratives of sexual violence.

  3. 3.

    ‘Par’ is commonly used in journalism to denote the brief, one or two sentence paragraphs that characterise newspaper reporting.

  4. 4.

    This does not seem to have happened in the Stewart case—the jury only deliberated for a short time, and Woolley and Avedissian (2010) reported that a juror cried when the verdict was read.

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  1. Independent scholar, Melbourne, Australia

    Deb Waterhouse-Watson

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  1. Deb Waterhouse-Watson
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Correspondence to Deb Waterhouse-Watson .

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Waterhouse-Watson, D. (2019). The Ethics of Court Reporting: Storytelling in the Courtroom and Newsroom. In: Football and Sexual Crime, from the Courtroom to the Newsroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33705-6_3

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