media studies spotlights

Courting justice

Joe Arney — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 19:34:51 +0000

Courting justice Joe Arney Fri, 04/04/2025 - 13:34

By Joe Arney
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18) and Nandi Pointer

Ask any of her students how they prefer to get their news, or search for recommendations, or learn about their favorite TV shows, and Sandra Ristovska will tell you that they go on TikTok.

If you go

What: Justice by Video, a full-day collaborative workshop exploring the roles research and policy can play in creating standards and safeguards around how video and photos are used in legal proceedings.

When: Friday, April 25. The public is invited to a screening of Incident, a short, Academy Award-nominated documentary, at 3:30 p.m. Panel discussions featuring the filmmakers and experts will follow.

Where: Richard Jessor Building, Room 155, 1440 15th St., �鶹ӰԺ. Advance registration not required.

Yet their educations—from the time they first set foot in a grammar school classroom—have focused on textual literacy, with almost nothing devoted to how video and photos are analyzed.

“We just assume that everybody intuitively knows how to understand images, because we don’t have to teach you an alphabet, or grammar,” said Ristovska, associate professor of media studies at the College of Media, Communication and Information. “But we know from research that people can watch the same image and arrive at a vastly different understanding about what that image says or does.”

More: Bringing student activism to TikTok videos

That’s fun when we’re overanalyzing a plot twist in Severance. But Ristovska’s work centers around what happens when videos make their way into a courtroom, where interpretations can influence a person’s guilt or innocence.

According to one estimate, video appears in about 80 percent of criminal cases, but no guidelines exist for how video can be presented as evidence in court. And that’s also the case for deepfake videos or media created by generative artificial intelligence.

“Anybody who’s seen a legal document knows they’re standardized—if it doesn’t look a certain way, it’s not going to be admissible in court,” Ristovska said. “But when it comes to video, different courts have different guidelines and understandings about what’s admissible.”

Ristovska has been an important contributor to scholarship in media and the law. At a daylong event later this month, she’ll help steer the conversation around these topics while taking the wraps off the Visual Evidence Lab, a new lab at CMCI that will advance her work in this area.

The workshop, Justice by Video, will bring together judges, attorneys, journalists, and scholars from the humanities, social sciences, law and STEM to develop new avenues for research and potential policy proposals around how to ensure justice is best served. She hopes focusing some of the leading thinkers in this area—and encouraging cross-disciplinary discussion—lays the groundwork for establishing consistent guidelines around visual evidence.

Ristovska’s personal history plays a role in all this, too. Growing up in what is now Macedonia during the Yugoslav Wars, she still recalls how footage from the fighting upset her parents—even if she was too young to understand the news bulletins interrupting her evening cartoons. As part of her graduate school work, she went on to study how footage from civilians and activists made its way to the United Nations’ criminal tribunal, in The Hague.

“I realized the law was an important place to be asking questions about video evidence,” she said. “Some of the citizen footage in the tribunal wasn’t verified through the person who shot it, which had never been the case before. And this footage was both establishing the truth in court while constructing a historical memory about the wars.”

Cross-disciplinary expertise

Sandra Braman, a professor of media and information at Michigan State University, said she is particularly excited about participation in this event because of the range of expertise involved, including practicing judges as well as legal scholars and researchers from across the social sciences.

Braman has twice served as a visiting professor at CMCI, and is considered among the leading scholars in digital technologies and their policy implications. She was impressed with the agenda, which includes small group discussions intended to stimulate cross-disciplinary discussion and a detailed reading list to review beforehand.

“Usually, when you go to the first conference of its kind, it’s just a chance to gather and talk generally about the topic,” Braman said. “Sandra has put together a very structured set of tasks that are actually very hard questions to guide us on visual evidence.”

Roderick Kennedy, who retired from the New Mexico Court of Appeals after serving as its chief judge, will be part of an afternoon panel discussing the issues raised by Incident, a documentary of a police shooting in Chicago and the role security footage plays in creating a narrative explaining what happened.

Kennedy and Ristovska met through his work with the American Bar Association. Ristovska presented a series of webinars on video evidence and deepfakes to members. They also collaborated when she was a guest editor of an issue of The SciTech Lawyer last winter that took a deep dive on these issues.

Kennedy said video evidence presents similar challenges that he would see with eyewitness testimony throughout his career. Memory is unreliable, he said, as witnesses become suggestible when asked to remember details or are affected by the pressure to have a definitive answer for investigators.

“You have a single viewpoint, but it’s overlaid with other memories that can change things, and is subject to interpretation every time you recall it and restore it,” he said.

‘A vertical learning curve’

A video won’t change its memory under pressure, but how it’s captured and edited can influence the way a jury interprets what happened. And while footage from police body cams or the smartphones of bystanders may get the most attention, Kennedy said the issue crops up elsewhere—even police interrogations. He shared a case involving a pathologist whose findings in a homicide were influenced by hearing a woman confess to the crime on camera.

Her confession, however, was preceded by an exhausting, seven-hour police interrogation. And because we’ve been conditioned to believe videos show reality—without considering how they were framed, trimmed, slowed down or otherwise edited—they have significant potential to mislead jurors.

“That’s the power of video,” Kennedy said. If you only show a jury the last minute or so of that interrogation, “all you see is a mother saying she killed her baby.”

The workshop isn’t just about editing techniques that may introduce doubt. Invited experts also will discuss deepfakes, an emerging challenge for courts that must catch up to the technology. Kennedy said judges and lawyers “have almost a vertical learning curve” when it comes to the technology.

“You have to learn the language of the technology experts before you can accuse somebody of using a deepfake,” he said. “And the experts aren’t taught how to speak legal, or the legal rules for putting their expertise in evidence.”

One thread of Braman’s research on information policy is the history of facts themselves.

“Our social orientation around facts provides the context within which we think about evidence,” she said. “And though we are talking a lot today about A.I. and the problem of deepfakes, the question of the authenticity and validity of digital information in general actually first arose as soon as the internet became available to the general public. We need to solve this problem yesterday.”

Ristovska said she hopes members of the public attend to watch Incident and start thinking about video as a communication tool that is overdue for guidance.

“We’re not going to solve all the challenges around how people see video—we can’t do that with any type of evidence,” she said. “But I hope we can develop research-based guidelines that promote consistency, fairness and equality in the use of video as evidence.”

Video evidence appears in 80 percent of criminal cases, but a lack of consistent guidelines means there’s no standard for how media are presented in court. A workshop led by CMCI faculty may change that.

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A body camera strapped to the chest of a police officer. Video appears in about four of five criminal cases, but no standards governing video exist in the U.S. justice system—and the problem is growing more complex, thanks to generative artificial intelligence.

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Meet Nabil Echchaibi

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 22:27:00 +0000

Meet Nabil Echchaibi Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/22/2016 - 15:27

Chair, Department of Media Studies • International Commentator

For Nabil Echchaibi, the media have always been more than a source of information or amusement.

As a child, he used books and films to explore the world beyond his home in Morocco. As a graduate student, he studied how Arabs used radio to share the difficulties of living in foreign cultures. And as a professor, he examines many types of media to understand how Muslims shape their identities in a modern and sometimes hostile world.

“The media are ubiquitous,” he explains. “We all use these technologies, but we don’t really pause to think about what these things are doing to us, and what we can actually do to harness the power of these technologies for better causes.”

That focus on thinking about media and its impacts is at the heart of what Echchaibi and his colleagues in the Department of Media Studies do. While Echchaibi focuses on Muslim culture, other faculty members look at how media can strengthen democracy, or how media influence the way people view race, gender and sexuality.

The goal, Echchaibi says, is to help students become knowledgeable consumers—and producers—of media.

One of three children from a middle-class Moroccan family, Echchaibi describes himself as a “cultural rebel.” He came to the United States on a graduate scholarship and by 2001 was thinking about his career.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 determined that course. In the days after the attacks, mentions of his Moroccan heritage were often followed by critical questions about religious extremism. Realizing the questions that now surrounded his religion, he turned his focus to what it means to be Muslim and modern.

“We live in a world where people are moved through vigorous discourse.”
- Nabil Echchaibi

His research covers many geographic areas and media formats. While studying televangelists in Egypt, for instance, he found that the Islamic tradition of sermonizing is well suited to television and the Internet. In Colorado he teamed up with historians, filmmakers and journalists to chronicle the history of Muslims in the mountain states.

Echchaibi writes often for international and national publications, including The Guardian in the United Kingdom andThe Huffington Post. As experts on the media’s impact, he says, he and his colleagues have an obligation to inform public discussion.

“Media studies allow you to see things beyond what they appear to be on the surface,” he explains. “The research I’m doing, hopefully and humbly, allows me to reveal something about a certain world that normally gets reduced to a caricature. I want people to see things differently.”

A professor who studies the media and publishes in the media. — “We live in a world where people are moved through vigorous discourse.”

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Meet Griselda San Martin

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 22:24:36 +0000

Meet Griselda San Martin Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/22/2016 - 15:24

(MJour’13) • Visual Journalist • Co-founder of Transborder Media

Not long ago, Griselda San Martin travelled to Mexico City to claim a second-place award for her short film, Soldiers Without a Nation, in a competition sponsored by the Mexican government and the United Nations.

The film tells the stories of permanent U.S. residents who fought for the American military only to be deported to Mexico for later criminal offenses. The deported veterans feel lost in the middle and San Martin believes their stories are too.

San Martin, originally from Spain, lived in several countries and always enjoyed taking pictures of the people and places she saw in her travels. When she came to CU-�鶹ӰԺ to pursue a master’s degree in journalism, she wanted to tell stories–a certain type of story. “I don’t like hard news,” she says. “I like in-depth stories.” Some of the stories San Martin wanted to explore in-depth were the lives of immigrant and their communities in the United States.

“We’re trying to tell stories from beyond the mainstream.”
- Griselda San Martin

San Martin’s favorite class in her first year at CU-�鶹ӰԺ was Media and Diaspora, a media studies class that explored how media portray and impact immigrant communities. After learning how the mainstream media reported on marginalized immigrants, San Martin completely changed her own approach. Rather than talking about immigrants, as many in the media do, she realized the best way to fight stereotypes and report a more truthful story was to let immigrants tell their own stories.

San Martin teamed up with classmate Elaine Cromie and travelled to Tijuana, Mexico to meet and interview many of the deported U.S. veterans living there. The duo have since returned many times and have produced several short videos about the veterans. “We’re not activists. We’re not taking sides,” says San Martin. “We’re trying to tell stories from beyond the mainstream.”

To further that goal, San Martin, Cromie and a third collaborator—Biana Fortis—have founded Transborder Media, a company dedicated to producing written and visual media that crosses borders. Currently, San Martin is documenting the Garifuna community in New York City in portraits and a documentary. Because the Garifuna immigrated from the Caribbean and Central America, they speak English, Spanish and their own language. San Martin is translating her work into all three, as part of her dream to tell stories “that transcend borders.”

A graduate of the journalism and media studies programs who tells stories that cross borders — “We’re trying to tell stories from beyond the mainstream.”

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Meet Tyler Rollins

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 22:23:20 +0000

Meet Tyler Rollins Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/22/2016 - 15:23

Media Studies Graduate Student • Researches Government Surveillance Programs

Tyler Rollins got his master’s degree in sociology at a school that, as he puts it, “has a reputation for being a somewhat radical campus.” Environmental activists sometimes slept in tree canopies to deter loggers. Others drove metal spikes into trees, ensuring any trespassing chainsaws would snap. The sociology department placed a big emphasis on social movements and their organization.

But “one of the things I always found lacking,” Rollins remembers, “was an understanding of the role the media played in these social movements.”

That type of understanding—the ability to think about and analyze the role and the impact of the media in society—is just what CMCI’s Department of Media Studies offers, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

“There’s always something fun about disrupting people’s preconceptions.”
- Tyler Rollins

Rollins came to CU as a doctoral student. His research focuses on American domestic surveillance projects between the end of World War II and 1975. Unknown to most Americans, U.S. intelligence agencies during this time intercepted and read the mail and telegrams of many citizens. Rollins uses historical and legal techniques to discover how these covert, questionably legal projects were operated, justified and criticized at the time.

Ultimately, he hopes that his work will help Americans grapple with recent revelations that the National Security Agency continues to collect the personal information of many American citizens. “If you can understand what was truly going on in the past and then compare that to our present issues, it gives you a new perspective,” he explains.

A graduate student who studies the history of government surveillance programs — “There’s always something fun about disrupting people’s preconceptions.”

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