Portrayals and Perceptions of the Supreme Court in a New Media Landscape

University Of Kentucky Research Foundation, Lexington KY

Investigators

Abstract

The media is the primary conduit by which Americans learn about the Supreme Court and the country's most important legal rulings. Yet with the explosion of online news coverage, Americans now routinely consume information from a wide variety of sources, including many that did not exist a decade ago. In this new media landscape, citizens encounter information that depicts the Supreme Court as deliberative, unbiased, and apolitical; or they may receive coverage that is very negative, ideologically polarized, and even inaccurate. Because the authority of the Court rests on the public's understanding of its procedures and guiding principles, the coverage that citizens encounter has significant ramifications for the rule of law. This project provides the first large scale investigation of Supreme Court media coverage across thousands of news outlets and explores the implications when it comes to support for the Court and the rule of law. The project consists of three main components. First, the project develops a web application that allows for the automated collection of Supreme Court news coverage from a wide variety of mainstream and non-traditional news sources online, in real time. The project will make text and image data from the application publicly available in a user-friendly format, so that scholars will be able to search and refine coverage based on dates, keywords, and sources, among other features. Second, the project develops a theoretical framework for understanding the most important features of coverage in a new media landscape. The framework highlights differences in the frames, tone, and complexity of coverage across mainstream and non-traditional outlets, specifically as they apply to Supreme Court news. The insights are tested by leveraging multiple text analysis tools and applying them to the coverage corpus. Third, the project explores the effects of both the content of coverage and media fragmentation more generally. The theoretical framework highlights the content and number of choices as two key aspects of the new media landscape. The project highlights how coverage that is simplistic, ideological, and negative in tone may increase the perception of the Court as a political institution, affecting the public's support for the Court and the rule of law. Using an experimental approach, the theory is tested with a series of novel survey experiments administered to U.S. citizens. This project is jointly funded by the Law and Social Sciences program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research(EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.