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

媒体是美国人了解最高法院和国家最重要法律裁决的主要渠道。然而，随着在线新闻报道的爆炸性增长，美国人现在经常从各种各样的来源消费信息，其中包括许多十年前还不存在的来源。在这种新的媒体格局中，公民会遇到将最高法院描述为深思熟虑、不偏不倚和不带政治色彩的信息；或者他们可能收到非常负面的、意识形态两极分化的报道，甚至是不准确的报道。由于法院的权威取决于公众对其程序和指导原则的理解，因此公民遇到的报道对法治具有重大影响。该项目首次对最高法院的媒体报道进行了大规模调查，涉及数千家新闻媒体，并探讨了对法院和法治的支持所产生的影响。首先，该项目开发了一个网络应用程序，允许从各种主流和非传统新闻来源在线实时自动收集最高法院的新闻报道。该项目将以用户友好的格式公开提供该应用程序的文本和图像数据，以便学者能够根据日期、关键字和来源等特征搜索和改进覆盖范围。其次，该项目开发了一个理论框架，用于理解新媒体环境下报道的最重要特征。该框架突出了主流和非传统媒体在报道框架、语气和复杂性方面的差异，特别是当它们适用于最高法院新闻时。通过利用多个文本分析工具并将它们应用于覆盖语料库来测试洞察力。第三，该项目更广泛地探讨了报道内容和媒体碎片化的影响。该理论框架强调了选择的内容和数量是新媒体格局的两个关键方面。该项目突出表明，过于简单化、意识形态和语气负面的报道可能会增加法院作为政治机构的看法，影响公众对法院和法治的支持。使用实验方法，通过对美国公民进行的一系列新颖的调查实验来验证这一理论。该项目由法律和社会科学计划和既定的激励竞争研究计划(EPSCoR)联合资助。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.