Why Justice Must Reveal the Whole Context in Media Reporting — Not Just the Prosecution’s Case or the Verdict.
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Modern justice prides itself on transparency, yet the very system that claims to illuminate truth too often controls its light. What the public receives as “justice reporting” is not the full context of a case — but a filtered narrative dominated by prosecutorial framing. The defence, where the counterweight of fairness resides, is frequently reduced to a footnote or omitted altogether. The verdict then becomes the headline, while the circumstances that could transform its meaning remain buried beneath silence.
Justice, when reported without the defence’s narrative, becomes propaganda by omission. It gives the public the illusion of understanding while feeding a single-sided moral judgment. In many cases — as seen in wrongful convictions, misrepresented sexual offence prosecutions, or moralised family disputes — the media echoes only the institutional voice of accusation. The public is invited to condemn without context, to interpret guilt without insight, and to absorb the law’s outcomes without the human realities that shaped them.
To reveal the whole context means to disclose both the prosecution’s construction of guilt and the defence’s exposition of truth — not as competing spectacles, but as dual halves of justice’s integrity. When either side is excluded from public comprehension, what remains is not justice but the theatre of authority.
1. The Moral Failure of the Guilty–Innocent Binary
Our current justice system operates on a stark binary: guilty or innocent. These words carry immense weight — they decide liberty, reputation, and destiny — yet they reveal almost nothing about the complexity of human behaviour. They declare outcomes, but hide stories. They expose responsibility, but conceal context.
In this concealment lies the quiet crisis of modern justice. When verdicts are stripped of their narrative background, the public is left with symbols rather than understanding. We are told what happened according to law, but not why it happened, how it unfolded, or what it truly meant. The law’s language becomes administrative, not human.
Justice, in such a system, becomes a tool of classification — not of comprehension.
2. The Human Hunger for Context
Human beings make sense of morality through stories, not verdicts. We seek coherence. We want to know why someone acted as they did, what pressures or motives influenced them, what misunderstandings occurred, and what truths lie beneath accusation.
When the legal system conceals this context, it leaves a vacuum that the media eagerly fills — often with the most sensational or one-sided version of events. The public is then invited not to understand, but to judge blindly.
Consider the case of Joseph Maxwell Spencer, convicted under Section 1 of the Protection of Children Act 1978. To the ordinary reader, such a conviction evokes images of indecent child exploitation. Yet the context, hidden during proceedings and omitted from coverage, tells another story: he was involved in an enduring family life relationship and created a Halloween costume inspired by Fifty Shades of Grey — not indecent images of children.
Similarly, in Joseph Maxwell Spencer’s prosecution under Sections 9 and 10 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the contradiction reveals the structural absurdity of the system itself. Spencer was acquitted by a jury on three counts under Section 9 — the very counts alleging sexual activity with a person under sixteen — after the supposed victim’s own evidence confirmed that no such activity had ever occurred. Yet, paradoxically, the same testimony that secured his acquittal on those counts was reinterpreted to convict him on a single count under Section 10, which concerns causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity. In effect, the court constructed an offence without an act — a conviction without a crime — by abstracting fragments of context and discarding the exonerating whole. This is where the jury’s abstraction becomes problematic: they start reading intention into context, rather than deriving it from evidence. To the uninformed public, the resulting conviction appeared to validate the existence of an actual allegation or event; in truth, it was the product of prosecutorial invention and judicial confirmation bias.
These contradictions exemplifies the moral incoherence of modern justice: the language of protection weaponised against its own principles, and the architecture of law manipulated to preserve the image of legitimacy even when its substance collapses. What emerged in Spencer’s case was not justice but performance — a symbolic conviction, maintained not by facts but by the moral spectacle of appearing to defend the vulnerable.
The absence of context transformed a misapplied statute into a moral catastrophe. His name became a symbol of something he did not do — not because of false reporting, but because the justice system and the media both refused to tell the full story.
3. When Context Becomes a Weapon
In the present model, “context” itself is controlled. The public rarely hears both sides. What appears in news articles or police press releases is usually the prosecution’s narrative, polished for moral effect and framed through institutional language.
The defendant’s context — their motives, misunderstandings, explanations, or mitigating truths — is either muted by legal representatives or excluded entirely under the pretext of “protecting the trial.” Similarly, the victim’s perspective is filtered through the prosecution and police, edited to strengthen the State’s case rather than to reveal their lived truth.
This one-sided context distorts public understanding. It conditions society to believe that justice is whatever the police or Crown Prosecution Service say it is. A truly informed public must learn to reject such one-sided narratives — to recognise that context is incomplete unless both sides are heard directly.
4. The Participatory Model: Context as a Shared Truth
In a participatory model of justice, context is not a privilege; it is a public right. Both the defendant and the complainant are entitled to tell their own stories — unfiltered by police, lawyers, or institutional gatekeepers.
When cases are discussed publicly, both narratives must appear side by side, in their own words. Only then can the public develop an informed, empathetic, and critical understanding of what occurred.
This shared-context approach demands a new cultural expectation:
The public must not take seriously any media narrative that presents only one side of context.
If the newspaper, broadcast, or social media post reveals only the prosecution’s view, it is not truth — it is partial propaganda. Justice cannot coexist with partial truth.
5. Responsibility Over Guilt
Replacing the language of guilt and innocence with responsibility and context is not a softening of justice — it is a refinement of it.
Responsibility acknowledges human agency but situates it within its true environment. It asks:
- What role did this person play in the outcome?
- What intentions guided their actions?
- What social or institutional conditions enabled harm?
- What remedies or reforms could prevent recurrence?
Unlike guilt, which ends the conversation, responsibility begins it. It recognises that people act within webs of influence, perception, and limitation — and that moral judgment must consider these webs if it is to be fair.
6. Justice as an Educative Practice
The purpose of justice is not only to punish or compensate but to educate. A transparent system should teach citizens about moral complexity — how harms occur, how conflicts escalate, and how society can heal.
When verdicts hide context, justice loses its educative power and becomes a performance for bureaucracy. When context is revealed — openly, narratively, and from both sides — justice transforms into a living civic dialogue.
Citizens begin to understand the moral architecture of conduct rather than absorbing labels of guilt or innocence. Ignorance gives way to empathy; judgment gives way to comprehension.
7. Media as an Illuminating Practice: Teaching, Not Merely Telling
The purpose of the media is not merely to report what happened or to sensationalise stories for public amusement, but to educate. A transparent system should teach citizens about moral complexity — how harms occur, how conflicts escalate, and how society can heal. The true vocation of journalism is illumination, not performance.
Such illumination requires more than headlines or partial truths; it demands that both the prosecution and defence narratives be presented side by side, drawn directly from the words of both parties, without editing, omission, or interpretive bias. Only then can the public see justice in its full texture — not as a contest of spectacle, but as a human process of discernment. Through this balance, the media ceases to be a mouthpiece of authority and becomes what it was meant to be: the educator of the democratic conscience.
8. Truth as Contextual Integrity
Truth, without context, becomes a weapon. Philosopher Hannah Arendt once warned that “truth without context is propaganda.” The same applies to law and the media.
To say “he was convicted” may be factually correct but ethically incomplete if the public does not know why or how the conviction arose. Truth requires contextual integrity — the wholeness of meaning drawn from all sides of the event.
A participatory system, by revealing the shared context, reclaims truth from institutional secrecy and media distortion. It restores justice and media to their rightful role: for one to decide, and the other to illuminate.
9. Reimagining Public Responsibility
The participatory approach does not only reform courts; it reforms culture. The public itself must evolve. Citizens must learn to distrust one-sided narratives, to demand both stories before forming moral judgments.
In this new civic ethic, the media’s legitimacy depends not on its speed of reporting but on its completeness of context. Police statements, prosecutorial press releases, and selective leaks lose moral authority unless paired with direct, unfiltered statements from the accused and the complainant alike.
Only when both contexts stand side by side can society approach something close to justice — not as institutional procedure, but as collective understanding.
10. Conclusion: Toward a Justice That Illuminates
The future of justice lies not in more verdicts but in more understanding. The public’s hunger is not for punishment, but for truth — full, balanced, unedited truth.
A justice system that continues to conceal context will deepen division, ignorance, and cynicism. A participatory system that reveals shared context will strengthen moral literacy, civic responsibility, and empathy.
Justice must therefore move beyond the language of guilty and innocent to the higher language of responsibility and context. Only then can it become what it was always meant to be — not an instrument of fear, but a mirror of truth for an enlightened society.
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