Media Coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court: How Do Journalists Assess the Importance of Court Decisions?

Abstract

Agenda-setting theory is central to understanding the connection between media and American government. Indeed, legislative and executive branches of American government are often characterized by their publicity-seeking behavior. This is not true of the judicial branch. However, the importance of media coverage is magnified for the United States Supreme Court because, lacking the public affairs mechanisms of the other two branches, the Court is dependent on media dissemination of information about its decisions. Despite this important role, little is known about what attracts media to cover Supreme Court cases. We ask what case characteristics attract media attention. We examine the effect of case variables on general media coverage of Court decisions (a concept we call “newsworthiness,” measured by whether mention of a given case decision appears on the front page of the New York Times) and on inclusion of a case on a list of legally significant cases over time (a concept we call “legal salience,” measured by the appearance of a case in the Congressional Quarterly's Guide to the Supreme Court). Examining cases over a 54-year period, we identify characteristics of cases appearing in either the New York Times or the CQ Guide or both. We conclude media news values may not always lead to coverage of the most legally salient cases, but some overlap indicates several cues used to judge immediate newsworthiness of cases stand the retrospective evaluation of legal significance. [Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resources: issue area matrices and predicted probabilities of case characteristics.]

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