Framing the High Court: Longitudinal Analysis of Supreme Court News Coverage

In the past fifty years, the American political system has become increasingly polarized in all levels and branches of government. Unique to the last decade, however, is that the partisan divide and ideological sorting once limited to Congress has now reached the Supreme Court. For the first time in the history of the Court, the Justices' ideological positions align along partisan lines: every liberal Justice was appointed by a Democrat; every conservative Justice was appointed by a Republican. The image of the Supreme Court has changed from being an institution that was separate from and above politics, to one that has become an increasingly partisan battleground. But how did we get here? Looking for answers, this paper recognizes the critical role of the media in these developments and examines the last thirty years of Supreme Court news coverage across six American television channels—ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and NBC. Using a mix of computational and qualitative content analysis, I trace changes in the frequency and volume of media attention and in the presentation of Supreme Court news. In particular, this paper explores differences in the linguistic characteristics and style of the news coverage—such as subjectivity and the use of emotion—as well as the framing of the Court over time and across news channels. These preliminary results provide empirical evidence and commentary on the relationship between media coverage and the evolving perception of the Supreme Court.