The Third Branch in the Fourth Estate: The Media's Role in the Diffusion of Legal Knowledge

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Virtually all scholarship about public opinion and the Court ispredicated on the view that the media are principal actors indiffusion of knowledge about the Court. Yet most Court reporters havelittle to no legal training and media coverage may conflict sharplywith views in the legal community. So, what role does the media playin the public understanding of the Court? Do news and editorialboards exercise discretion in writing about law in systematicallydistinguishable ways? What are these implications for the studyof judicial politics? What are the normative implications?To date, virtually no systematic, large-scale, empirical examinationhas shed light on the foundational role that the media play in thediffusion of legal knowledge. This project fills thatvoid 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 theCourt that examines all news stories and editorials on the Courtwritten by over 20 major newspapers in a 10 year period. A majorportion of the project is the development of widely-applicable,easy-to-use software and statistical methods for analyzing the contentof 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.