Seeing Justice Witnessing, Crime and Punishment in Visual Media

A behind-the-scenes look at the struggles between visual journalists and officials over what the public sees--and therefore much of what the public knows--of the criminal justice system.

In the contexts of crime, social justice, and the law, nothing in visual media is as it seems. In today's mediated social world, visual communication has shifted to a democratic sphere that has significantly changed the way we understand and use images as evidence. In Seeing Justice, Mary Angela Bock examines the way criminal justice in the US is presented in visual media by focusing on the grounded practices of visual journalists in relationship with law enforcement. Drawing upon extended interviews, participant observation, contemporary court cases, and critical discourse analysis, Bock provides a detailed examination of the way digitization is altering the relationships between media, consumers, and the criminal justice system. From tabloid coverage of the last public hanging in the US to Karen-shaming videos, from mug shots to perp walks, she focuses on the practical struggles between journalists, police, and court officials to control the way images influence their resulting narratives. Revealing the way powerful interests shape what the public sees, Seeing Justice offers a model for understanding how images are used in news narrative.

Mary Angela Bock is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Media at The University of Texas at Austin. She studies the construction of media representations and the way they can perpetuate or dismantle systems of oppression. She has written numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and has authored or edited three books. Bock's previous career spanned more than 20 years in television news, with stints as a newspaper reporter, a radio journalist, and public relations writer. She received her PhD from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009.