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最高法院的学术研究都是基于这样一种观点，即媒体是传播最高法院知识的主要角色。然而，大多数法院记者几乎没有接受过法律培训，媒体的报道可能与法律界的观点大相径庭。那么，媒体在公众对最高法院的理解中扮演了什么角色呢？新闻和编辑委员会是否以系统可区分的方式在撰写法律时行使自由裁量权？这些对司法政治的研究有什么启示？规范的含义是什么？迄今为止，几乎没有系统的、大规模的、实证的研究揭示了媒体在法律知识传播中所起的基础作用。这个项目填补了这一空白：——描述了媒体如何通过硬新闻报道和社论，随着时间的推移，在不同的案件中，在不同的渠道中描绘最高法院的运作；——评估媒体对最高法院的报道与法律界的理解有何不同；——提供公开可用的数据和简要措施，说明媒体如何传播有关最高法院的信息；-为报纸文章和社论的统计分析提供文档化，易于使用的软件。该项目是对法院媒体报道的首次评估，审查了20多家主要报纸在10年期间撰写的有关法院的所有新闻报道和社论。该项目的一个主要部分是开发广泛适用，易于使用的软件和统计方法来分析新闻文章的内容。在这样做的过程中，主要调查人员能够解决媒体如何、什么、何时、何地以及为什么报道法院的基本问题。

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.