Judicial Ideology and the Press
Among the elected branches and the broader public, positivity toward the press is deeply ideological. Public polling shows that most liberals favor the press while conservatives view it more negatively. This partisan divide has only deepened in the last decade.
Conventional wisdom holds that the ideological split is also at work within the government’s third branch—that the liberal justices of the United States Supreme Court champion the work of the press while their conservative colleagues threaten to erode press freedom. Historical examples of liberal stalwarts who advanced news-gathering protection as a companion principle to broader democracy-engagement and social justice issues buoy up this perception. Recent calls from some conservative justices to unwind major longstanding protections for journalists amplify it further.
But the conventional wisdom may be wrong. Analysis of our coded opinion dataset, capturing the tone of every paragraph mentioning the press in the history of the Court, reveals that while ideology historically has been highly correlated with a justice’s press positivity, the once-vibrant liberal support for the press has disappeared.
This article explores those trends. It reports and investigates a series of interrelated data that reveal increasing negativity from the Court’s conservatives alongside an apparent overall gravitational pull away from press friendliness by the whole Court. It examines how ideology has become a poorer predictor of press support and shows how the data belie some initially appealing explanations for the decline in liberal positivity. The data suggest that support for the press is simply no longer a meaningful component of liberalism at the Court. It has been decoupled from other liberal principles with which it once was connected.
About the Public Law Workshop
Michigan’s Public Law Workshop provides an opportunity for faculty and students from across the University to enjoy weekly presentations by leading scholars producing current work on topics ranging from constitutional law and administrative law to international law, statutory interpretation and beyond. Professors Julian Mortenson and Maureen Carroll organize the workshop. If you would like to receive workshop announcements, please contact Alex Wroble ([email protected]) and ask to have your name added to the workshop’s email list.
