The documentary “Central Park Five,” by Ken Burns, Sara Burns and David McMahon and “When They See Us” film by Ava DuVernay presents a famous sexual assault case that made headlines in New York. The Central Park Five” is a documentary filmed in 1989 and sought to depict how five African Americans and Hispanic boys found themselves guilty after accusations they sexually assaulted a white female jogger in the Central Park. The documentary incorporates the five victims encounter with justice and focuses on the social injustice and the crime rates in New York that might have triggered the popularization of the case. The documentary fails to show the interviews with those who championed the five innocent boys to be incarcerated, such as Donald Trump, and instead focus on the social issues. However, in When They See Us” Duvernay offers a scripted approach to the same event but with a sharp focus on the five accused boys, their family turmoil and their time in prison. The documentary and the film showcase a similar event from similar and different perspectives regarding mob mentality, social injustices, forceful confessions, incompetent social justice system and bad journalism as the main factors that led to the incarceration of innocent boys.
After watching the documentary and the film, numerous individual-level and macro-level effects elicit on their audiences, such as an indescribable state of anger because of the systematic failures of the justice system and the society’s polarizing attitudes of fear hatred and isolation. The documentary shows a powerful indictment of a society’s failings where justice is denied because of profit-driven journalism. According to Asimow and Mader, many people are falling victim to pop culture where the media has become a source of unreliable information because they are keener in providing entertainment (8). The victims are wrongfully imprisoned after manipulating the police into confessing to a crime that they did not commit. Burns successfully integrate how the five boys were manipulated by the New York Police Department (NYPD) to confession to the rape and assault crime and digs deeper into other societal issues that catalyzed the case, such as the surging crimes in New York. Therefore, the documentary creates anger and rage in its audience because it presents how innocent boys’ lives were taken away due to the justice system’s failures and mob mentality that had been overcome by revenge and not a sense of logic or fairness. According to media effects, people will be more likely to be triggered to anger and rage because “A media message could activate the recall of previously learned information, the recall of an existing attitude or belief, an emotion, a physiological reaction, or a previously learned behavioral sequence” (Potter 43). Similarly, Ava DuVernay paints a relatable picture in a different perspective by showing the boys’ torments, family turmoil, the torture in prison, and false confessions fueled by racism and a bad relationship between law enforcement and people with black-brown skin color. From a macro-level perspective, these media have negatively affected law enforcement agencies and reduced their confidence in the American justice system.
These media artifacts use central and more subtle law and justice issues such as wrongful arrest and incarceration to educate people about vices such as social injustice, the incompetent social justice system, and bad journalism and their impact on society. The documentary showcases the lack of transparency in the justice system. Even though the interview with the law enforcement proved that the DNA of the accused did not match that of the victim, the justice system still went ahead and incarcerated the boys without enough evidence. Therefore, the documentary educates the audience about the existence of a broken justice system that uses dubious means to render injustices based on public pressures and not through evidence or fairness due to presuming “consequences without the prior investigation of content, as the conventional research paradigm tends to do” (Gardner and Gross 180). In contrast, the film by DuVernay focuses on the issues of racism and lousy journalism in educating the viewers about the root of the wrongful incarceration of the African American and Hispanic boys and why the media was responsible for creating a “guilty” assumption or ideas in the minds of the larger public. DuVernay uses the agenda-setting theory, which explains that the mass media is responsible for shaping public opinion rather than the public itself. Therefore, the film strives to educate the viewers about media influence on creating a particular narrative in the minds of the public with the primary purpose of converting it to profit. Additionally, the two media uses the central issue of false confessions to educate the public on how broken and incompetent the justice system is why it should not be trusted in rendering fairness because “They legitimize action along socially functional and conventionally acceptable lines” (Gerbner and Gross 176). The documentary and the film teach the public about the deep-rooted incompetency affecting the justice system and the importance of verifying news instead of relying on profit-driven media or journalists for accurate information. The documentary and the film explore deep issues beyond law and justice by depicting how media influence institutions and how race influences which are likely to be branded as criminals, rapists or lawbreakers and why the minorities fall prey to wrongful incarceration.
These media have a significant impact on the audience because they usher new changes that educate people beyond the law and justice issues and incorporate the “real world” impact of the media on individual and macro levels. For instance, the documentary did not only focus on the case only but incorporated other subjects facing society at the time, such as a surge in the crime rate in New York. The documentary successfully depicts how the boys were victims of constructed reporting and bad timing, which aligns with Gerbner’s media effects theory which claims that in any television story, the killing of a helpless victim “demonstrates to us who the bad guy is “and” When another character then kills the transgressor, the second act of violence tells us who the good guy is, often by showing how that behavior is rewarded” (Busselle and Bulck). The statement depicts how the documentary could educate people beyond law and justice by demonstrating how a person is branded a villain while another person who has committed the same crime is branded as a hero. In contrast, Ava DuVernay goes further to introduce different changes away from law and justice by incorporating racism and bad media influence. The director uses a lightly fictionalized version of the event to reveal the historical public punishment of brown and dark-skinned men by using a defiled white woman as a scapegoat. There is a similarity between these two media because they all focus on how the justice system is the modern tool used by the media and elites in society to render injustices based on public opinion and not through logic. The changes highlighted by these media to facilitate the education of people beyond law and justice suggest that the real world is influenced by the information they consume in media and the justice system being pressurized to bend to public opinion in administering justice. According to Robson and Silbey, in the real world, the media positions the viewer to adapt particular point of view such as “…to see some groups of people as trustworthy, dangerous, disgusting, laughable; to experience some kinds of violence as normal; to see some lives as lightly expendable” (5). The statement aligns with the changes by these media, such as personal experiences of the accused boys and the racism, to educate viewers beyond law and justice by introducing other factors that might have influenced their wrongful incarceration.
Conclusively, the “When They See Us” film and “The Central Park Five” documentary illustrates how a common incident can be told in similar and different approaches and still retain its validity. Although the documentary is a “traditional media,” it highlights most of the issues present in the Netflix film by Ava DuVernay, which is a “modern media.” These media create numerous effects on individuals and society by showing the impact of mob mentality, social injustices, forceful confessions, the incompetent social justice system, and bad journalism in the administration of law and justice. These issues highlighted by these media prove that the justice system and public resulted in criminalization and victimization of the boys accused of rape and championed their incarceration out of revenge and not logic and fairness due to bad media influences who reported what they wanted people to believe and not the reality. Therefore, these media go beyond law and justice issues to highlight other factors that led to the wrongful conviction of the five boys, such as the crime rates at the time and the racial stereotypes that placed the African Americans and Hispanics as criminals. Generally, the documentary failed to highlight essential factors such as racism and bad media influences, but the film covered these loopholes creatively and more realistically.
Works Cited
Asimow, Michael, and Shannon Mader. Law and popular culture: A course book. Vol. 8. Peter Lang, 2004.
Busselle, Rick, and Jan Van den Bulck. “Cultivation theory, media, stories, processes, and reality.” Media effects: Advances in theory and research (2020): 69-82.
Gerbner, George, and Larry Gross. “Living with television: The violence profile.” Journal of communication 26.2 (1976): 172-199.
Potter, James W. “Chapter 3: What Is a Media Effect?” Conceptualizing mass media effect, pp. 33-49.
Robson, Peter, and Jessica Silbey, eds. Law and justice on the small screen. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012.
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