Conflict Between Report Right And Judicial Power And Its Solution

The relationship between freedom of the press and judicial independence has been heated topic in the field of legal journalism. Being the two fundamental values in a democratic society governed by law, the two were born with innate opposability whereas they pursue the same value, which is to establish and improve the social justice. The goal provides a possibility for the two to co-exist in a long run.Previous researches on this topic focused on the freedom of press and the independence of trail and decision. Few have included the analysis of criminal journalism in China let alone viewing or narrowing the particular issue in the perspective of conflict between freedom of press and judicial independence. In the past, instead of vertically and horizontally analyzing the development of Chinese judicial system and the growth of press, researchers tended to focus on the logic deductive inference toward foreign concepts. Therefore, instead of limiting the concept of judicial power to mainstream point of view which is based on the separation of executive, legislative and judicial powers implemented in the United States, I brought the Chinese judicial power in a practical level in into the picture within the framework of procedure of criminal cases, which consist of investigation, prosecution and trail. By looking into the reports on criminal cases for the past 30 years in China, this research analyzed the conflict between right of report and j judicial power and sought for solution in the perspective of journalism and law study.This paper analyzed the conflict between the two in four parts. The first chapter focused on the historical review of this particular issue after Chinese Open Door Policy by listing the reports of representative criminal cases and showing the process of that the conflict evolved from an invisible issue to being recognized and later became a new challenge. The cases were from different eras and reported by different ways of communicating. At the same time, I looked into the different characteristics of different eras and tried to find out the path of evolution of this particular conflict.The second chapter had a closer look on the conflict between the right of report and the power of investigation, as well as the conflict between the power of inspection and the power of jurisdiction. I put it into the order of the procedure of handling criminal cases, including criminal investigation, criminal prosecution and criminal trail and eventually analyzed the character of the conflict and how different working procedure and professional requirement influence the conflict.The third chapter concentrated on the factors which had caused the conflicts between the right of report and the power of jurisdiction, pointed that one of the factors brought the right conflicts is the lack of professional quality of criminal practitioners and the judiciary staff reports, analyzed the relationship of the right of report and the power of jurisdiction based on the social environment, combining the text analysis of ChuTian Metropolis Daily and deemed that it is commercial media and the problem in judicial power allocation itself that are the more hidden factors which also be responsible to the conflicts.The fourth chapter concentrated on the solution of the conflict, including improving the professionalism in both media and jurisdiction units. On one hand, not only should media insist on journalism professionalism, but also improve the jurisdiction professionalism in criminal news report in order to cope with the jurisdiction goal. On the other hand, jurisdiction units need to emphasize the openness of information and construction of instruction while improving its own jurisdiction professionalism. Besides, I believe that the right of report should be maximized in order to achieve the openness of information and materialize the social justice in a long run, which, for sure, need to be established within the existing jurisdiction framework.However, improving the professionalism of media and jurisdiction can not resolve the conflict fundamentally, which worried me after examining the current situation. None of the media and jurisdiction has materialized a true sense of professionalism or functionalism other than being "the tool of the power", which leads to the fact that none of them are able to break down "the fence of power".