Case Salience and Media Coverage of Supreme Court Decisions: Toward a New Measure

Judicial decision-making is contingent on a case’s salience, meaning that scholars who wish to understand how judges make political decisions must have adequate measures of salience. Unfortunately, existing measures of salience have met with some skepticism. After discussing the limitations with the most common measures of salience, we construct a new measure of case salience that avoids many of these problems. Through examine newspaper coverage in four regionally and ideologically diverse newspapers, we establish a new proxy for case salience based on coverage in multiple media sources. By developing and testing this new measure, we uncover patterns about national media coverage of the Court and provide a potentially more representative measure of case salience.