All the News That’s Fit for the Internet? Coverage and Sharing of SCOTUS News

• In Event: Courts and Judges in the News and ‘New’ Media

Abstract

Media coverage of the Supreme Court matters a great deal when it comes to public opinion about the Court, knowledge of political institutions, and the rule of law. Today, coverage of the Court comes from and increasingly diverse and fragmented media landscape, yet much of what we know about the Court’s public portrayal and support comes from research focusing on legacy media institutions. We bring a source of extensive new data to this discussion. We develop 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. Notably, the application draws data from all corners of the internet, including mainstream, specialized, partisan extremist, and even fake news sources. We analyze approximately 50,000 Supreme Court-focused articles from 4,000 sources over a key two-year period spanning multiple nomination battles and the 2020 election. To provide the most comprehensive portrait of coverage in the new media age, our inquiry proceeds in multiple steps. First, we catalog important features using text-based measures of coverage. We examine key differences in ideological slant, complexity, and emotional tone between mainstream sources and other corners of the internet. Next, we use topic modelling to understand differences in the selection of issues on which media sources choose to focus. Finally, we recognize the power of social media to amplify some coverage and other articles. Our web application allows us to track the spread of articles through multiple social media sites over time. We use this feature to explore how widely news from mainstream, specialized, and partisan extremist sources circulates. Our findings reveal an interesting and cautionary tale. We find that coverage from select “new media” sources (e.g., specialized internet sites or partisan extremist outlets) differs systematically from that put out by the mainstream sources on which past studies focus. Specifically, we find that “new media” sources emphasize different topics, even when covering the same political event. This implies that the perception that Americans have of the Supreme Court today is very different – and rapidly evolving – compared with the one they received even a decade prior. We also find that partisan extremist news about the Court spreads much more readily through social media. Even as mainstream sources produce a substantial portion of Court-focused news, their coverage tends not to attract as much attention in the age of social media. Our findings have broad implications for the study of political communication, institutional support, democracy, the rule of law, and the health of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Authors

• Justin Wedeking, University of Kentucky

• Michael Zilis, University of Kentucky