This article considers the relationship between media culture, surveillance, and the law. It argues that scopic technologies such as closed circuit television (CCTV), together with nonfiction “reality” television and reportage, are helping to produce new intersections between media and social space. This article maps some of these intersections. It also unpacks some of the important ethical and political questions raised by these new formations and their inhabitation. How do these new technologies and genres inform and shape the public’s real and imaginary relationship with the law and its executives? What stories do they tell about crime, fear, and social order? How do they affect the previously established divisions between public and private space?
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