Media

Studying media coverage of courts and their decisions is a natural pursuit for students of the judiciary. Courts are passive institutions, and judges generally do not hold press conferences, send out constituent mail, make TikTok videos, or tweet (or should we say “post” now that we are in the era of X rather than Twitter). What most people know about courts and their work is often filtered through the lens of the media. Understanding the judiciary and its role in our society, then, requires us also to understand how and why the media covers the courts. To this end, our volume has three contributions.

First, Professors Bankston and Shieh make use of the expanding definitions of media by examining the Facebook ads placed between Justice Kavanaugh’s nomination and the midterm election soon after his confirmation. Using the 50,000 ads, they explore how interest groups and candidates use this new media landscape to leverage and politicize a Court nomination. Next, Professors Black, Johnson, Owens, and Wedeking examine the relationship between trust, legitimacy, and access. Using two experiments, Black and his coauthors find that how we access oral argument may affect our support for the Supreme Court. Last, Professors Joseph P. Bolton and Christopher D. Kromphardt examine media requests for televising hearings of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 1991 to 2005. Assessing the requests of local and national media allows Bolton and Kromphardt to investigate what drives coverage of oral arguments versus coverage of court decisions. The analysis finds significant differences between local and national interest and some divergence in factors that spur a request for coverage versus factors that yield coverage of a court decision.

“Co-Opting the Court” by Levi Bankston and Marcy Shieh

“Legitimacy, Trust, and Cameras in the U.S. Supreme Court” by Ryan C. Black; Timothy R. Johnson; Ryan J. Owens; and Justin Wedeking

“Black Robes in the Limelight” by Joseph P. Bolton and Christopher D. Kromphardt