Who Gets Covered? Media Incentives and Attention to Supreme Court Justices, 1980-2024

Abstract

This thesis examines whether the shift toward a subscriber-dependent newspaper business model is associated with changes in how major newspapers cover Supreme Court justices, including which factors predict how much attention individual justices receive. Using article-level data from 1980 to 2024 from the archives of major newspapers, I find evidence that attention to individual justices has increased in recent years when compared to the past couple of decades, though limitations in the archive prevent reliable comparisons to the 1980s. Opinion authorship is not significantly associated with media attention, but evidence shows that ideological extremeness is. Evidence also shows that conservative justices are mentioned in more articles than liberal colleagues with similar levels of ideological extremeness. These patterns are consistent with the idea that engagement incentives pressure journalists to write stories that news consumers are more likely to follow, understand, and engage with.