Beyond the Headlines: The Role of Print Media in Public Understanding of the Civil Justice System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Various forms of mass media are generally considered to be significant sources of all kinds of public information. Discussions concerning public understanding of and access to the justice system frequently contend that print and broadcast media play a particularly important role in formulating public understanding and opinion of Canadian courts. In the first part of this paper we discuss perceptions about the role of print media in reporting on civil justice issues from the perspectives of the justice community, the media, and the public. We recognise, however, that there is little research about the quantity or quality of media coverage of legal issues, especially civil justice topics. As part of the Civil Justice System and the Public project, a national study of communication between the civil justice system and the public, we have developed snapshots of the extent and content of legal coverage in two newspapers. After presenting observations from this exploratory study we conclude with suggestions for future research and for establishing improved collaboration between the justice community and the media, with the goal of improving civil justice coverage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".