Newspaper juries: A field experiment concerning effect of information on attitudes toward the criminal justice system

This article reports on a field experiment on the effect of media information on people’s attitudes towards the justice system. For the duration of a year a dutch local newspaper took small groups of readers, called ‘newspaper jurors’, to court sessions of criminal cases and subsequently reported on their experiences and perceptions. Using a quasi-experimental design, we examined whether an attitude change in the general reader population of this particular local newspaper occurred as a result of the jury’s newspaper reports. Findings show that, after the treatment interval of 1 year, no attitude change in the general reader population could be identified that was absent in the control group.