Comment les médias couvrent-ils les causes de justice? : l'affaire Guy Turcotte sous la loupe
The media are not an objective reflection of events and society. Instead, they use frameworks to construct the news. The newspapers follow a content-oriented style which is market-driven and results, among others, to the construction of a "story" that can better reach their readership.  Although studies on the representation of crime and criminal are numerous, rare are the ones focusing on the representation of the judicial system itself.   This thesis is particularly interested in how the media present the judicial system during the trial against Guy Turcotte in which the judicial system is heavily discussed and criticized. This case was used by several politicians eager to propose populist reforms, to suggest changes in the current system of justice, or to introduce more severity toward this type of crime. This study seeks to analyze if the media could have been contributors to penal populism by their use of populist policies during the presentation of this court case.   Specifically, the objective is to describe how the judicial and legal aspects are represented in the media. This goal is achieve through quantitative and qualitative analyzis of 239 articles published between 2009 and 2012 in the Journal of Montreal (JM) and La Presse (LP). They are newspapers known to have different editorial lines and distinct audiences.  The thesis analyzes the content of the articles and seeks to differentiate the presentation strategies used by the latter, according to the different periods (before, during or after the trial), and types of newspaper. The content of the articles are analyzed through the prism of penal populism strategies found in political speeches. The analyzes highlight the presence of strategies such as the use of emotion, the excessive simplifications, the discrediting of experts, and the polarization. Theses strategies are found more often in the Journal de Montréal and in the absence of new information (during the period after the verdict). The analyzes also show that the media can use strategies that are defined as counter populism, as it is the case with La Presse, who proposes a coverage which differs from one associated penal populism strategies.
Systeme justice Media Justice system Media Frames Populism Penal populism Frames Content analysis