Coverage of state supreme court cases by major dailies in 32 states can best be described as little or none. Typical coverage in a three-month period was one staff-produced story about one case.
A statistical analysis of opinions dealing with free-expression issues rendered during the first five years of the Rehn uist Court shows that this court was more supportimmediately preceded it. When the first four years of the Court's record are separated from the last year's, however, a different picture emerges. The drop in support for freeexpression issues that appears as the Court truly becomes a "Rehnquist Court," due to retirements of carry-over justices, may give rise to concerns about the future of freeexpression rights.*What is the record of the Rehnquist Court on cases involving the mass media and freedom of expression? This study attempted to answer that question by statistically analyzing the 64 freeexpression decisions from the first five terms of the Court.Libel decisions of the Rehnquist Court demonstrate how difficult it is to characterize the Court's record on free expression. In its first fwe years, the Court accepted only four of 134 libel cases for review, creating the impression that it was avoiding libel. But this was not the case; the Court's .80 libel cases per year was comparable to 1.18 cases under the Burger Court and .94 cases under the Warren Court'The first Rehnquist decision on libel, Hustler Magazine v, Falwell,' provided an occasion for celebration by defenders of free speech. The Court ruled 80 that the incredulous and satiric statements about the Rev. Jerry Falwell could not be the subject of a libel or infliction-ofeme tional-distress suit because the exaggerated statements could not reasonably have been interpreted as stating actual facts about the television minister. Both the result and the unanimity of the decision came as a surprise. Twenty-seven daily newspapers that editorialized about the decision praised it; the Chicago Tribune called it a 'strong and courageous stand," and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch termed it a 'ringing endorsement of the F i s t Amendment."' H u s t l e r was one reason that media law scholar Jerome Barron characterized the second term of the Rehnquist Court as reflecting a 'fundamental attachment to existing F i r s t Amendment doctrine." Barron said ive o 3 such issues than was the Burger Court, which
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