Direct Examination II: Data, Timelines, & How to Keep Track of It All
March 8, 2025
It’s been a month or so since I began watching movies, and while it is far too early to come to significant conclusions about my data so far, it’s still interesting enough to put into a blog post of its own. So far, I am about halfway through watching all of my nonfiction movies, and it’s presented with some interesting trends!
For one thing, I’ve found that almost all the movies I’ve seen so far are very character focused—in most of the movies, we find the focus of the plot on one singular character’s work and personal life. In civil cases, this is usually the attorney, and in criminal cases, it is usually the defendant.
The next striking finding so far is the stark difference between representations from civil cases and criminal cases. In every movie with a criminal case that I’ve seen so far, it is prosecution shown with an extreme negative bias. In every movie with a civil case that I’ve seen so far, the prosecution is the protagonist or hero of the story, but defense counsel is not shown in an overtly negative light. More often, it is the defendant in civil cases—large corporations—that are shown negatively, and not necessarily their representative counsel. This is really interesting to watch develop, because I really did expect that there would be more variation—looking forward to seeing if this continues or changes with further movies.
My method so far has worked with my research question: each movie I’ve seen has produced 0-8 timestamps that are reflective of how they characterize defense or prosecution. I do have movies that do not negatively represent either defense or prosecution at all, hence the lowest value being 0. Because of this, at the end of my movie binging, I am planning on giving an overall value to each movie. For now, I am thinking of negative prosecution points minus negative defense points for a total value, and then I hope to be able to rank my movies from a scale of extremely biased against defense to neutral to extremely biased against prosecution. This should produce an easy visualization of any bias I find.
But until then, it’s back to the movies.
What might be the real-world implications or consequences related to your findings?
Movies have an obvious impact on our personal opinions of others, although the extent of that impact is contested. As just one example, if criminal prosecutors are consistently shown in a negative light, it can mean that prospective law students are disillusioned to the field, creating a negative outlook for the profession’s future.
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I like how you plan on ranking your movies on a scale of bias! What do you think creates a difference between how people perceive reckless doctors (like House, for example) versus reckless lawyers?
Because when you hire a doctor, you don’t need them to be a great public speaker. You don’t even need them to be a very good person (e.g. House); you just need them to have medical knowledge. But if you have a lawyer who graduated at the top of their class from Harvard, that doesn’t mean anything unless they can also present themselves well—this means that when people hire lawyers, they’re hiring a performance. They can develop preconceptions about this performance from popular media in a way other professions don’t.
Looks great so far! I just have a couple questions: how many movies do you expect to have the 0 value, and how will this factor into your overall analysis? Will you chose to omit movies that you find don’t really apply to the research question after watching them?
It seems like you’re already seeing some patterns early on? My question is this –> different movies are going to have different frequencies of biased scenes. A movie with several very biased scenes could a lower rating than a movie that was less biased but had more dialogue focused on what you’re researching. Is this something you might consider factoring into your analysis?