Impact Of Interaction Between Online Legal Programs And Netizens' Comments On Judicial Publicity

Although online legal programs enjoy popularity among academic community, especially among those in media studies and law science, it is rare for linguists to study the interaction between online legal programs and netizens' comments. However, the interaction between online legal programs and the netizens plays a pivotal role in popularizing the law and improving the language use in legal reporting. Thus, the author decided to approach this topic from linguistic and forensic perspective.Based on Critical Discourse Theory, the author aims to unveil problems and provide enlightenment brought by the interaction between online legal programs and netizens' comments, so as to propose suggestions in judicial publicity, which can better guide media in legal reporting. The research adopted qualitative analysis, with the linguistic data collected from a popular online legal program on video site Youku, called Mr. Liang's View 2014: Inside Story of Huugjilt Case respectively.By sorting and analyzing linguistic data of online legal programs and netizens' comments, the author(a) studied the interactive linguistic data from the perspective of Speech Act Theory to discover the linguistic features of online legal programs and netizens' comments;(b) approached the interaction between online legal programs and netizens via three aspects, intertextuality, social context and coherence; and(c) based on the results of two surveys, explored the impact of the interaction between online legal programs and netizens on judicial publicity and offered suggestions on legal reporting.Against the background of law-based governance, the research analyzed the interaction between online legal programs and netizens' comments from three respects: linguistically, the interaction and impact on judicial publicity, and it is found that(a) the linguistic features of online legal programs are indirectness, unprofessional, and sometimes provocative, meanwhile features of netizens' comments are incompleteness, expressiveness and diversity;(b) functions of the interaction between online legal programs and netizens' comments are guiding function, supplementary function and topic-creating function, to be more specifically, they work collectively to attract the public's attention so as to guide the public opinion into different directions directly or indirectly, some of which may not conducive to the rational understanding of legal cases but will exert significant impact on legal cases through strong public opinion; and(c) suggestion for judicial publicity is to disclose information of legal cases according to information types.The findings will shed light on the standardization of language of online legal programs and the virtuous interaction between online legal programs and netizens' comments in popularizing the law. Furthermore, the research would be of practical and theoretical significance of the development of special legislation on legal reporting in China.