ObjectiveWe offer a novel consideration of how judicial behavior influences Court coverage, examining when the media use negative language to cover the Supreme Court, and the consequences of this portrayal.MethodsRegression analysis to examine over 1,000 news articles from 29 diverse outlets covering rulings from the 2014 term, using text‐based measures of the Court and media's negative coverage.ResultsWe find that the Court sends an important signal of conflict when using negative language in its decisions, leading to increases in negativity in subsequent coverage. We also show that this effect is conditional upon both the degree of consensus and ideological signals the Court sends when it rules.ConclusionThe media's treatment of the Supreme Court is in many ways a product of the conflict and ideological positioning that can be observed from the Court's rulings. It suggests that Court signals can attenuate media slant.

The chapter examines the current state of print, electronic, and social media in Europe and the US, and how its evolution has influenced mass behaviour, political representation, and democratic governance. We begin by surveying the dramatic changes that have taken place in the media environment—the shift in media technology from print to broadcast to the Internet, and how these changes influence the information environment and thus, the behaviour of citizens and elites. We then assess how various facets of the electronic media—that is, broadcast news, cable, partisan news, the Internet, and social media—influence political behaviour and representation. Despite a few exceptions, transformations in print, electronic, and social media in liberal democracies have tended to degrade the quality of representation in the last two decades, particularly in the US, where market forces are stronger and government regulations designed to buffer the market are weaker.