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

几乎所有关于公众舆论和法院的学术研究都基于这样一种观点，即媒体是传播有关法院知识的主要行为者。然而，大多数法庭记者几乎没有受过法律的培训，媒体报道可能与法律的界的观点发生尖锐冲突。 So，what role作用does the media媒体playin the public上市understanding理解of the Court法院？ 新闻和编辑委员会在以系统可区分的方式撰写有关法律的文章时是否行使自由裁量权？ 这些对司法政治学的研究有何意义？规范方面的影响是什么？迄今为止，几乎没有系统的、大规模的、经验性的研究揭示了媒体在法律的知识传播中所起的基础性作用。 这个项目填补了这一空白：--描述媒体如何通过硬新闻故事， 社论，描绘了最高法院的运作， - 评估媒体对法院的报道如何不同于对法院的报道， 法律的界的理解; -提供可公开获得的数据和简要措施， 描述媒体如何传播有关最高法院的信息 - 提供有记录的、易于使用的统计软件， 分析报纸文章和社论。该项目是第一次评估媒体对法院的报道，审查了10年期间20多家主要报纸撰写的关于法院的所有新闻报道和社论。 该项目的主要部分是开发广泛适用、易于使用的软件和统计方法，用于分析新闻文章的内容。 这样，主要调查人员就能够解决媒体如何、何时、何地以及为什么报道最高法院的基本问题。

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.