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Abstract
In this article, we develop and test an economic theory of Supreme Court news. We hypothesize that information about the Third Branch is newsworthy when it has lower production costs and qualities attractive to the audiences and advertisers desired by news organizations. We examine Supreme Court news in elite newspapers, television news broadcasts, and online news sources during the October 2008 and 2010 terms. The results of our quantitative analyses indicate that all three types of news outlets are more likely to provide content about Supreme Court decisions with substantive importance but vary in their responses to costs and qualities appealing to the lay audience. We conclude by discussing the similarities and differences among news outlets with regard to their selection of Supreme Court information as news content.
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Notes
1. Some recent scholarship challenges the hard news–soft news distinction. CitationLehman-Wilzig and Seletzky (2010) argue that scholars should utilize a third category defined as “general news” rather than the hard/soft news dichotomy. CitationReinemann, Stayner, Scherr, and Legnante (2011) recommend that communication scholars adopt a scale or additive index to distinguish between degrees of hard and soft news. This debate is beyond the scope of our article.
2. CitationPatterson (2000) demonstrates that the percentage of news stories without an explicit public policy component increased from about one-third in 1980 to one-half in 1999.
3. CitationGraber (2009) states explicitly that news content is selected for its audience appeal rather than its significance or broader value to society.
4. CitationDavis (2011) describes how some justices interact with journalists to influence coverage of themselves and their institution.
5. Data acquisition is a recurring problem for scholars interested in the content of online news (CitationFox & Van Sickel, 2001, p. 111). Our efforts were constrained by the limited archives of our news Web sites of interest. The Huffington Post began archiving its content on June 15, 2008, but its screen capture software malfunctioned frequently during 2010, preventing data collection for the October 2009 term. The archives of The Drudge Report included no screen captures from January 2010. Private communication with the Drudge Report Archives Webmaster on December 10, 2010, revealed that the images were lost despite redundant backups when the electronic files were migrated from one server to another. We attempted to acquire archival content from the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) and Lexis Nexis without success.
6. Both USA Today and the Wall Street Journal exceeded the circulation of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. We declined to analyze them because the Wall Street Journal focuses heavily on business and financial news and USA Today is not perceived as highly influential despite its broad circulation.
7. The ratings of one possible alternative to network television news, cable news programs, are much lower than those of broadcast television news.
8. Rankings are available at http://www.alexa.com/topsites/category/Top/News.
9. On February 7, 2011, Internet provider AOL announced it would acquire The Huffington Post.
10. Both Liptak and Greenburg have law degrees. Liptak is a graduate of Yale Law School, and Greenburg earned her law degree at the University of Chicago.
11. The archive is available at http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu.
12. The Drudge Report Archives are available at http://www.drudgereportarchives.com, and The Huffington Post Archives are available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/archive.
13. However, some studies of Supreme Court news consider the relationship between geographical proximity and news sources (e.g., CitationDavis, 1994; CitationMaltzman & Wahlbeck, 2003).
14. Market-based theories of news content also argue that spatial proximity influences news content. However, CitationBeam (2003) demonstrates that spatial proximity is less influential for news outlets with weaker connections to their local markets. News organizations focused on their local markets are likely to produce news appealing to people there; these individuals are expected to demand less news about public affairs and more news focused on their home areas. The elite news outlets in our study focus on national news. Nonetheless, we tested whether spatial proximity influenced the coverage of Supreme Court cases filed in New York and California in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, respectively, because these newspapers have economic incentives to appeal to local subscribers, readers, and advertisers. We estimated iterations of our logistic regression models for each newspaper including binary variables for New York case or California case. These variables failed to approach statistical significance in either model. The results of these models are available from the authors by request.
15. Data are available at http://scdb.wustl.edu/data.php.
16. Predicted probabilities were calculated using CLARIFY (CitationKing, Tomz, & Wittenberg, 2000) in Stata 11.1 with continuous variables at their means and binary variables at their modes.
17. CitationHamilton (2004, pp. 179–189) analyzed the influence of news costs on Supreme Court news. He focused extensively on network television news rather than other types of news organizations, and his model included only cost trends at each network rather than costs associated with news content about specific events.