Television News and the Supreme Court: All the News That's Fit to Air?

Sensationalism and Sobriety Differential Media Exposure and Attitudes Toward American Courts

“…Previous research on differences in coverage between traditional and nontraditional media outlets supports this expectation (e.g., Moy and Pfau 2000;Slotnick and Segal 1998;Spill and Oxley 2003). Indeed, Moy and Pfau (2000), in a content analysis of media genres in the mid-1990s, find that newspapers and other print media sources provided relatively benign coverage of political institutions, especially for the court system.…”

“…In contrast, they note the "strikingly negative" coverage of institutions within nontraditional sources, with political talk radio tending to be the most critical (p. 81). Slotnick and Segal (1998) find that television coverage of the Supreme Court is of a generally low quality, and that television reporters often mischaracterize decisions. Spill and Oxley (2003) find that the tone of the coverage of the Supreme Court differs based on media type.…”

“…General ignorance of the inner workings of the courts can be partly attributed to the media's meager coverage of these institutions, leaving an informational void for most citizens (Slotnick and Segal 1998). Moreover, while we know that politics and ideological battles do occur in courts, the media may downplay these realities, leaving many people to fall back on the myths they develop about the courts earlier in life.…”

Chief Justice Burger and the Bench: How Physically Changing the Shape of the Court's Bench Reduced Interruptions during Oral Argument

“…Without these summaries, journalists sometimes found it difficult to report accurately on the Court's decisions, especially when they worked under tight deadlines. 3 Burger also secured funding to hire more Supreme Court law clerks. In 1970, he persuaded Congress to increase the number of clerks from two to three (the Justices had been able to hire two law clerks per term since 1946).…”

Every Picture Speaks a Thousand Words: Visualizing Judicial Authority in the Press

“…But neither insights appear to have generated work on the visual aspects of the judicial image. The neglect of the visual aspects of the judicial image in news and factual reporting (Davis,1994;Slotnick and Segal, 1998) echoes their neglect in research on news and factual reporting more generally (Domke, Perlmutter and Spratt, 2002;Huxford 2001;Newton, 2008;Zeiler, 2005).…”