The Challenges of Criminal Law in the face of new media

Abstract

The article firstly presents how mass-media is inclined to select information on pragmatic/commercial criteria and not necessarily using as a point of reference the relevance of the information. The result of such selection could be a distorted representation of reality, that could create artificial collective worries and could consequently influence criminal policy and the functioning of the criminal system. The second part of the article analyses the influence of the media representation on criminal policy, in particular in the actual context of the so-called “liquid democracy” developed around the new media (specifically the Internet). The author focuses on the risks that this form of democracy might involve, namely the potential violation of some fundamental principles in the democratic modern systems. The conclusion is dedicated to the culture of criminal law, the author promoting a form of public education, respectively a politico-criminal paideia, adapted to postmodern democratic and mass needs, which seeks to pursue the ontological content of minimum levels of knowledge of citizens, such as internalizing those fundamental values ​​that constrain the ethos of contemporary civil society.