Understanding Variations in Media Coverage of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

Abstract

Given the central importance of news media in providing the public with information about court decisions,this study examines variations in local and national media coverage of the Supreme Court decision on a Texas antisodomy law known as Lawrence v. Texas.The authors use content analysis of newspaper articles to test hypotheses concerning how media coverage of the case might vary by media outlet. The authors assess bias by examining overall coverage and the tone of coverage.The analysis suggests that media outlets varied in their coverage of the case,with states that had existing sodomy laws providing more coverage,and that some outlets tended to be more biased in their tone than others. The analysis confirms the importance of local relevance,but the authors also find that media outlet size and political context may play a role in determining coverage of an issue.

Regional media framing of the Confederate flag debate in South Carolina

“…Tone was coded following Haider-Markel et al (2006) as the amount of article space devoted to arguments in favor of or against flag removal, but coders used the broader measure of two thirds or more of content to count as favorable or unfavorable demonstrated by S. H. Kim et al (2014). If two thirds or more of the article content contained arguments unfavorable to the flag's removal, the article was coded as 1, unfavorable.…”

Patterns in the politics of drugs and tobacco: The Supreme Court and issue attention by policymakers and the press

“…While a variety of studies have considered how US Supreme Court attention to an issue can generate media coverage of the issue (Flemming et al, 1997(Flemming et al, , 1999Haider-Markel et al, 2006;Ura, 2009), this work can be expanded to consider how this Court-media relationship can affect issue attention in the macro political system across all branches of government. Gaining a thorough understanding of this Supreme Court-media nexus, including its potential impact on policy attention by the elected branches, takes on greater importance given the relative prominence of the Court as a vital policymaker and the news media as the predominant source of political information for citizens in the modern political system.…”

Critical coverage: How the media criticize supreme courts—Evidence from Israel

“…2 2 The neutrality of most articles has been confirmed by a wide variety of studies of the media coverage of both politics and the courts, including Miller et al (1979), Sauvageau et al (2006), and Haider‐Markel et al (2006). …”