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Abstract
Previous studies have shown that a small number of Supreme Court decisions that “rearrange[d] the … distribution of political benefits” have drawn the media's attention to the underlying issues involved in those cases. This article provides an additional test of that empirical claim, examining the effects of the Supreme Court's gay rights cases on media coverage of homosexuality from 1990 to 2005. The data indicate that Supreme Court decisions that expanded the scope of gay rights increased coverage of homosexuality in both The New York Times and USA Today, while cases that affirmed the existing scope of gay rights had no such effect.
The author would like to thank Tom Carsey, Peter Enns, Kim Hill, Mike MacKuen, Dave Peterson, Jim Stimson, Georg Vanberg, and the anonymous referees for providing valuable feedback on this project.
Notes
1. While this study focuses on the relationship between Supreme Court decisions and issue attention, there are other literatures on the Court and the media. One strand of this scholarship examines the way in which media cover the court, generally finding that newspapers tend to focus on political responses to the Court's decisions rather than the substantive legal issues involved in its cases (CitationEricson, 1977; CitationNewland, 1964; but see CitationLarson, 1985). Alternatively, other scholars have focused on understanding when the media turn their attention to the Court, finding that its activities in salient issue domains tend to produce coverage of the Court (e.g., CitationSlotnick & Segal, 1998).
2. Specifically, I use those orally argued cases for which the variables “PARTY_1” or “PARTY_2” are coded as “GAY.”
3. This procedure is superior to using Spaeth's “ISSUE” variable. This variable might be used to identify cases that include those relevant for this study, such as privacy and due process, but these identifiers would include many other cases that are not relevant (i.e., the “ISSUE” variable does not identify a class of gay rights cases).
4. This finding contrasts with the well-known conclusion reached by CitationRosenberg (1991), who argued that Supreme Court decision making does not significantly alter the media's coverage of particular issues. CitationFlemming et al. (1997) conclude that Rosenberg's result is a product of his reliance on an overly broad measure of media coverage of race-related stories, which failed to capture sharp increases in media coverage of segregated public education and racial segregation generally (p. 1229).
5. The keywords are gay, gays, lesbian, lesbians, homosexual, and homosexuals. Interestingly, the most regular contamination of this procedure is the annual surge in the number of articles mentioning the keyword “gay” surrounding the anniversary of the American bombing of Hiroshima at the close of World War II. As such, articles that include the term “Enola” are excluded.
6. Even though broadcast and electronic media are increasingly important for the mass audience, print media remains relevant for both the public and (especially) political elites. To choose one recent example, CitationVan Belle's (2003) study of bureaucratic responsiveness to media agendas found that (a) U.S. foreign-aid allocations were responsive to media attention to international events and (b) the New York Times' coverage of international affairs explained a greater degree of variance in the aid-allocation data than broadcast media. In addition to his substantive conclusions, Van Belle makes the methodological claim that “in the absence of conceptual, methodological, or practical justifications for using television coverage, and for several reasons beyond those found here, such as availability, ease of coding content, greater variation and greater temporal domain, The New York Times is likely to be the more useful source for the practical challenge of measuring news media coverage.” Thus, this study, like most previous scholarship on media agenda setting, focuses on print media.
7. The time series' trends are diagnosed by the estimation of the OLS model yt = α0 + α1 t + ε t , where α1 indicates the estimated trend component, which is significantly different from zero for both series (p < .05; two-tailed tests).
8. Unfortunately, these data cannot shed much light on the paths over which this influence travels. Do Supreme Court decisions draw the attention of reporters and editors to new issues directly? Or do the Court's actions activate elites and interest groups who in turn create additional newsworthy activity in the wake of the Court's actions? Surely, each of these mechanisms plays some role in the process, and uncovering the precise causal sequences involved in translating judicial behavior (or policy changes more generally) into media attention seems likely to be an important frontier in judicial politics and political communication scholarship.
Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986).
Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000).
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 783 (1954).
Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958).
Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).
Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 377 U.S. 218 (1964).
Hurley et al v. Irish-American Gay Lesbian and Bisexual Group, 515 U.S. 557 (1995).
Illinois ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Education, District 71, 333 U.S. 203 (1948).
Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003).
Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (1984).
Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996).
Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989).