Focusing on mass media expressions and views of justice and its public perception, we propose ourselves to understand the configurations of strains generated by the relationships between the media agents and the judicial players and their repercussions in the public sphere.
The adopted methodological strategy will be mostly focused on the qualitative content analysis of media discourses about justice, produced in recent years in the Portuguese society, as well as on interviews made to privileged informants. The discursive productions by the media on the judicial system emerge as a relevant aspect of this project, enabling the questioning of the boundaries that shape the construction and production of power, not only in the judicial administrative sphere but also in the media, in the search for two key objectives with significant social repercussions. On one hand, we have to understand the intricacy of the relationships established between both the mass media and the judicial players, namely on what concerns the impacts of the media in the judicial system. On the other hand, and as the citizen’s representations of the judicial system are grounded in the information obtained in the media and in its articulations with experiences of direct contact with the courts, this study will put in perspective some central features in the relationship established between citizens and the State.