1
The U.S. Supreme Court regularly articulates policies of profound political and social
consequence. Rarely, however, does the Court take a significant or active role in the broad
dissemination of those policies to the mass public. Indeed, where spokespeople for the executive
branch or members of Congress often appear publicly to make the case for a given policy or action,
the Court simply delivers its opinion and then leaves it to others to communicate it (see, for example,
Franklin and Kosaki 1995). As a result, the Court’s policies are extremely vulnerable to the framing
effects of the media — no small matter, inasmuch as media frames have a significant bearing on the
public’s opinion formation towards the Court’s policies (Clawson and Waltenburg 2003).
In this paper, we seek to understand how these consequential media frames come into effect.
We do so by going to the source of the frames themselves. Using semi-structured interviews, we
examine a convenience sample of the journalists who covered the Supreme Court decisions in the
University of Michigan affirmative action cases.
1
More specifically, we queried journalists from the
mainstream, Black, and Latino media concerning their general approach to covering the Court; their
selection of sources; and the role of exogenous forces on the structure, organization, and tone of their
coverage.
1
Gratz et al. v. Bollinger et al. (539 U.S. 244 [2003]); Grutter v. Bollinger et al. (539 U.S. 306 [2003]).
Given the political nature of the story, we expected obeisance to the journalistic norms of
“fairness” and “objectivity” (Bennett 1996) in the reporters’ coverage of issues and their selection of
sources, particularly among members of the mainstream media. We also expected that both the
Convention