“If it doesn't make sense it's not true”: how Judge Judy creates coherent stories through “common-sense” reasoning according to the neoliberal agenda

Abstract

This study examines the American court show Judge Judy. Drawing on both conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis, this paper aims to show how ideological assumptions about how to be a “good citizen” manifest themselves at a turn-by-turn level in the interactions on Judge Judy and how they contribute to the co-construction of a new version of events. The microanalyses reveal how Sheindlin's strategic use of “common-sense reasoning” sets up a context and characterization of the opposing litigants. Sheindlin reframes complex issues as simple black-and-white stories. These new stories have a plain narrative line without the contingencies of everyday life and with clearly moral and immoral characters allowing her to pass a judgment that only seems fair.

Keywords:

• Judge Judy court show
• ideology
• common sense
• neoliberal
• morality
• critical discourse analysis

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments as well as E. Finegan for his feedback on an early version of this paper.

Notes

1. ATI multimedia center is a tool with which to record television programs digitally, directly on a computer.

2. Transana is a software program which “is designed to facilitate the transcription and qualitative analysis of video and audio data. It provides a way to view video or play audio recordings, create a transcript, and link places in the transcript to frames in the video. It provides tools for identifying and organizing analytically interesting portions of video or audio files, as well as for attaching keywords to those video or audio clips. It also features database and file manipulation tools that facilitate the organization and storage of large collections of digitized video.” The program is available at http://www2.wcer.wisc.edu/Transana/Transana

3. Taking responsibility and being self-reliant are high on the list of moral priorities of the strict father model that Lakoff describes.

4. While these litigants have appeared on television with their real names I have changed them for pseudonyms.

5. At least, this is not made explicit. Elsewhere in the transcript Land reports that Jane was told by the police she was not to be in that house, but as television viewers we do not know if indeed Jane had for instance a restraining order and the issue is not taken up by Sheindlin.

6. The in-studio audience is, apparently, an audience of paid actors (The Decator Daily, January 30, 2004), who no doubt are instructed to be supportive.

7. Incidentally, when there still was a public audience the age restrictions were 18–40 years old according to the website tvtix.com (as is the case also for “Divorce court” a show which has a nonactor audience).