Abstract:
With the appearance of Chinese newspapers in the late Qing Dynasty, legal news vigorously occurred and started to play its role of reporting legal events, conveying public opinions and supervising judicial trials. The Shen Daily began to act as mass media as a judicial trial supervisor by reporting and comment the case of Yang Naiwu and Xiaobaicai, which played some leading role to affect the whole situation in reversing the unjust case and enhancing a reform of the current judicial system. In time of the Republic of China, mass media acted the role “the court of public opinions” in the case of Shi Jianqiao’s assassination of Sun Chuanfang and dramatically turned the judicial trial into a trial of public opinions under the control of mass media. These two sampled cases show that mass media are by no means negligible in influencing judicial trial by synthesizing public opinions, and that the subjectivity of audience of mass media determines that mass media can synthesize public opinions only according to the universally accepted code of social morals. However, since the audience’s preference of narration determines that mass media fall into “curious complex” in reporting judicial trials, this tendency is likely to give rise to a fictionalized narrative mode and interrupt judicial trials. In other words, in a power-based society, mass media's final supervision of judicial trial should call for support and cooperation of power elements.
