Citizens hold the Supreme Court in high regard, and this esteem necessarily, for most, must be based on mass media news coverage. Content analysis of Supreme Court coverage by three networks, three news magazines and three major newspapers finds the press is selective in type of cases covered. The best coverage fit to actual types of cases decided was in the New York Times. All sampled news media gave more coverage to civil rights cases than the number of these cases would justify. First Amendment issues also received close news media attention, but economic and other issues did not. High public esteem of the Supreme Court is based on an incomplete look at the court's workload.
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O’Callaghan et al. (1992) studied this question.