Abstract
‘No matter whether the country follows the flag or not’, the fictional Mr. Dooley gibed more than a century ago, ‘the Supreme Court follows the election returns.’ The image of the Court’s members as political actors who closely monitor – and attempt to shape – public opinion is the subject of Richard Davis’s Justices and Journalists, which uses historical research and a content analysis of recent press coverage to chronicle the relationship between the media and the Supreme Court over time and to examine how and why justices ‘go public’.
Davis, a political science professor at Brigham Young University, devotes most of the book to tracing the Court’s practice of ‘strategic external relations’ over time. Chief Justice John Marshall, for example, used pseudonymous essays in the partisan press to engage in policy debates and to build support for the Court as an institution. Nineteenth-century justices often had more personal motives for engaging the press, as many who had held elective office continued their political activity while on the Court. Institutional norms regarding political participation shifted during the 20th century – while Charles Evans Hughes became the Republican nominee for president in 1916 as a sitting justice, Sandra Day O’Connor was unusual among recent justices for having served in public office before her nomination.
Because the motives for individual justices to ‘go public’ usually involve a political agenda, whether their own, as in the case of Hughes, or someone else’s, as in the Nixon administration’s efforts to impeach William O. Douglas, much of Davis’s account focuses on the political activities of justices more than their press coverage per se. As a result, much of the book’s history, while fascinating, may be of interest more to Court watchers or history buffs than to journalism scholars.
More directly relevant to media scholars is the strategic communications aspect of Davis’s analysis. He argues that justices reach out to the press for a number of reasons, both personal and institutional: to influence policy, to burnish their own reputations, to convey subtle messages to other members of the Court, and to defend the integrity of the Court itself. Still, the efforts of justices to shape public opinion are often at odds with the Court’s carefully crafted image as the branch of government immune from popular sentiment and above the fray of partisan politics. This mystique, which Davis argues is necessary to maintain the Court’s authority and ensure deference to its rulings, may be at risk when justices engage the press. When, then, is ‘going public’ necessary? And does a desire for greater transparency about the work of the Court outweigh the risk that increased coverage may undermine its public legitimacy?
While Davis leaves these larger questions open, he suggests that recent years have seen a sea change in the justices’ perception of their own roles as political actors; in the type of press coverage the Court receives; and in institutional norms about the Court’s public image and its relationship with the press. The ‘celebrity culture’ that defines the media environment of the 21st century has brought increased pressure on justices to tolerate or even embrace their status as public figures.
Davis’s empirical study seems to confirm a significant shift in the media landscape. One chapter of the book summarizes a content analysis of coverage of individual justices (including successful nominees during the confirmation process) from 1968 to 2007 in the New York Times and on NBC Nightly News. The last decade studied (1998–2007) saw a considerable increase in the number of stories in the New York Times, even as television coverage decreased. Even more striking is the evidence of a major change in the emphasis of coverage over that decade, as The Times focused more on individual justices and their personal stories than on cases before the Court. While some of the change can be attributed to retirements or other event-related causes, Davis concludes that much of it can be traced to conscious efforts on the part of individual justices to increase their media profile.
From policy speeches to C-SPAN interviews to autobiographies, efforts by today’s Court members to raise their public profiles are more numerous and more explicit than those of justices in the past. Many of the recent examples could serve as novel case studies for students studying public relations and political or organizational communications. Certainly the questions raised by Davis about the effects of the justices’ recent efforts to ‘go public’ are important ones, and they make Justices and Journalists essential reading for those concerned about the Court’s institutional role today and in the future.