Portrayals and Perceptions of the Supreme Court in a new Media Landscape

Over the last two decades, online news has exploded, and many Americans now consume media coverage in an increasingly fragmented environment. Scholarship demonstrates the critical role that media coverage plays in shaping support for the U.S. Supreme Court and the rule of law, but there has been no work that explores coverage in this new media landscape. Given the rise of new media, how has coverage of the Supreme Court has changed in recent years? What are the potential ramifications for democracy and the rule of law? This project aims to understand the media landscape facing the Supreme Court in the modern era. We develop a beta version of a web application that scans the internet in real time, which we use to collect a large body of Supreme Court coverage from a variety of sources. Using text analysis, we are able to explore numerous features of this coverage, including its ideological content, cognitive complexity, tone, and propensity to personalize by focusing on individual justices. The data on articles and their features will merge seamlessly with both the case- and justice-centered versions of the U.S. Supreme Court database, allowing researchers to gain insight about the linkages between media coverage and judicial behavior.