Virtually all scholarship about public opinion and the Court is predicated on the view that the media are principal actors in diffusion of knowledge about the Court. Yet most Court reporters have little to no legal training and media coverage may conflict sharply with views in the legal community. So, what role does the media play in the public understanding of the Court? Do news and editorial boards exercise discretion in writing about law in systematically distinguishable ways? What are these implications for the study of judicial politics? What are the normative implications?
To date, virtually no systematic, large-scale, empirical examination has shed light on the foundational role that the media play in the diffusion of legal knowledge. This project fills that void by:
-- characterizing how the media, via hard news stories and editorials, has portrayed the workings of the Supreme Court over time, across cases, and across outlets;
-- assessing how media coverage of the Court differs from the understanding in the legal community;
-- providing publicly available data and summary measures that describe how media outlets disseminate information about the Supreme Court;
-- providing documented, easy-to-use software for the statistical analysis of newspaper articles and editorials.
The project is the first assessment of media coverage of the Court that examines all news stories and editorials on the Court written by over 20 major newspapers in a 10 year period. A major portion of the project is the development of widely-applicable, easy-to-use software and statistical methods for analyzing the content of news articles. In so doing, the principal investigators are positioned to address foundational questions in how, what, when, where, and why the media reports on the Court.
