News Judgment and the Supreme Court

Authors

Adam J. Schiffer, Texas Christian University
Rebecca L. Fitzmaurice, Texas Christian University

Volume Number

49

Issue Number

1

Abstract

News-judgment criteria – the standards journalists use to ascertain the newsworthiness of an event or phenomenon – play a key role in shaping news coverage of politics. For example, why do some Supreme Court decisions receive mainstream media coverage while others do not? The most intuitive predictor of coverage is a case's fit with well-theorized criteria such as timeliness, color, simplicity, and impact. However, previous studies of Court coverage measure a case's fit with journalistic routines and values with blunt and indirect measures. We create a more granular measure utilizing multiple coders to evaluate case summaries for their fit with several news-judgment criteria, thereby illustrating the potential of crowd-sourced assessments of newsworthiness. We find that the new measure is strongly correlated with coverage in the New York Times and six television outlets.

Recommended Citation

Schiffer, Adam J. and Fitzmaurice, Rebecca L. (2021) "News Judgment and the Supreme Court," Journal of Political Science: Vol. 49: No. 1, Article 3.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.coastal.edu/jops/vol49/iss1/3