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的法律裁决的主要渠道。然而，随着网络新闻报道的爆炸式增长，美国人现在经常从各种各样的来源获取信息，其中包括许多十年前不存在的信息。在这种新的媒体环境中，公民接触到的信息将最高法院描述为审慎、公正和非政治性的；或者他们可能会收到非常负面的、意识形态两极化的、甚至不准确的报道。由于法院的权威取决于公众对其程序和指导原则的理解，因此公民所接触到的报道对法治具有重大影响。该项目首次对数千家新闻媒体对最高法院的报道进行了大规模调查，并探讨了对法院和法治的支持的影响。该项目由三个主要部分组成。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应用程序中的文本和图像数据，以便学者能够根据日期、关键词和来源以及其他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，用于理解新媒体景观中报道的最重要特征。该框架突出了主流媒体和非传统媒体在报道框架、语气和复杂性方面的差异，特别是在最高法院新闻方面。通过利用多个文本分析工具并将其应用于覆盖语料库来测试这些见解。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。理论框架强调内容和选择的数量是新媒体景观的两个关键方面。该项目强调，过分简单化、意识形态化和负面语气的报道可能会增加人们对法院作为一个政治机构的印象，从而影响公众对法院和法治的支持。采用实验方法，对美国公民进行了一系列新颖的调查实验，对该理论进行了检验。该项目由法律和社会科学项目以及促进竞争研究的既定项目（EPSCoR）共同资助。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.