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Clawson, Rosalee A, Strine IV, Harry C, and Waltenburg, Eric N

Page history last edited by Paul Russell Laverack 14 years, 11 months ago

Clawson, R.A., Strine IV, H.C., & Waltenburg, E.N. (2003).  Framing Supreme Court Decisions: The Mainstream Versus the Black Press.  Journal of Black Studies, 33(6), 784-800.

 

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Rosalee A. Clawson is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University. Following her undergraduate work at DePauw University, she received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Ohio State. Her research at Purdue focuses on American politics. Specificially, she is interested in public opinion, political psychology, the mass media, and the politics of race, class, and gender.

 

Harry C. "Neil" Strine, IV is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.  He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Purdue University in 2004. His areas of research include American Politics, Quantitative Methodology, Political Communication, and Comparative Politics.

 

Eric N. Waltenburg is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University. Following undergraduate work at Indiana University, he completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at Ohio State University. His teaching and research interests are judicial politics, constitutional law, state politics, and American constitutional and political history. Currently he is engaged in research programs focusing on why political actors choose to use litigation as a means to achieve their policy goals.

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In "Framing Supreme Court Decisions: The Mainstream Versus the Black Press" Clawson, Strine, and Waltenburg employ content analysis to compare coverage of a Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action policies by, on the one hand, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and on the other, twenty-two examples of the black press. They find "systemic differences" in the coverage, paying particular attention to the framing of discussion from both types of newspapers.

 

The authors open by placing the discussion in context –to wit, how the Supreme Court is popularly considered to be unbuffeted by the mundane political winds which bedevil the other branches of government –that somehow, adherence to the Constitution as a "sacred text" immunizes the justices from the poisons of partisanship. While this perception has its advantages, the authors point out how this above-the-fray attitude leaves the Court's decisions "vulnerable to the framing effects of interested parties." The authors then offer a definition of this term, which figures prominently in what follows.

 

The authors do not shy away from making a pointed critique of the mainstream media, such as when they say, "Reporting on the Court tends to... concentrate largely on civil rights and First Amendment questions. Moreover, it tends to be wrong." At the same time, they allow that litigating parties will utilize the media to steer discussion of Court decisions, in order to emphasize the best possible coverage of their side. Further, the authors assert, "[I]t may well be that not all these media cover the Court's decisions in the same way..." Enter the black press.

 

The authors draw on Wolseley several times to provide background on the activist, advocacy role of the black press. (To this reader's mind, they go to the Wolseley well once too often.) Here they pose the central question of the piece, which is worthy of discussion even as its answer has both already been implied and is obvious to the point of being self-evident: "Does the black press frame the Court's decisions differently than the mainstream media?"

 

The case in question is 1995's Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Federico Peña, Secretary of Transportation, et al. The article's endnotes make mention of the fact that the case involves a Hispanic business, rather than a black-owned one –the authors point out that the black press covers important stories relating to other minorities, as well. The particulars of the case are so closely worded, it is challenging to make out how they translate into everyday life –the mainstream press, as the authors argue, do little to shed light on what the ruling means, focusing "primarily on the content of the Supreme Court ruling and less on its implications." This has the effect of "reinforc[ing] the myth that the Court is above politics." Conversely, the authors predict the the black press, "given its role as an advocacy press," would spill more ink on interpreting the ruling. And so they do. The authors discuss percentages and present tables supporting this assertion.

 

Moving beyond statistics, into examples of prose which can move emotions, the authors pull entire paragraphs out of black newspapers to illustrate the intense focus these journalists placed on Justice Thomas's role in undermining affirmative action policies –the first excerpt places Thomas's own racial identity squarely in the center of the discussion. However, the authors assert that the mainstream press "rarely made reference to Thomas's race... consider[ing] Justice Thomas newsworthy because of his concurring opinion, not because he was a Black justice ruling against the interests of minorities." This reader must disagree with that assertion. While the mainstream press avoids explicit mention of Thomas's skin color, the racial interest remains implicit in the coverage. Why else would Justice Thomas merit more mentions than Chief Justice Rehnquist, who also sided with the majority. It is this reader's opinion that, while the corporate media seeks to appear colorblind, they understand the interests of their readers, and will find a way to "bury the lead" when thorny question such as race are discussed. One may recall that it serves the business needs of the newspaper-owning class to have the Court opinions appear to come from disinterested parties on high –whereas the primary reason even the mainstream articles show a disproportionate interest in Thomas's opinion over, say, a Justice Kennedy, is transparent: Clarence Thomas is black. The statistics in their own table bear this out. The authors of this article, in this (admittedly minor) case, show a curious limit to the range of their imagination.

 

The later portion of the article focuses on framing, borrowing categories from Gamson & Modigliani's 1987 work on this question. Here Clawson, Strine, and Waltenburg make use of the "no preferential treatment" frame and the "remedial action" frame, which are two opposing ways of discussing affirmative action. As expected, they find the former in great abundance in mainstream sources. However, they suggest the "remedial action" frame, popular on the Left in the 1970s, evolved into a "dramatic setback" frame, as affirmative action proponents hunkered down under rising conservative encroachments into the earlier consensus. The authors find the "dramatic setback" lens employed far more frequently by the black press –as the mainstream press purports objectivity and impartiality, it is no surprise they would leave the dramatic setback frame little explored, choosing instead to view the decision through the dryly unemotional, bureaucratic "policy implementation" frame. That is to say, these Supreme Court decisions are free from values –they are simply rules, and the layers of bureaucracy will now execute them –with no discussion of how the new policies impact people's lives.

 

Lastly, the authors point out the late-coming wave of stories in the black press which frame the discussion more or less as, "Affirmative Action Not Dead." It is unclear to this reader whether these later frames –policy implementation and affirmative action not dead –originated in the work of other scholars, or among these authors for this article. It is this reader's opinion these later terms lack both the rhetorical force and the clarity of the earlier ones, such as no preferential treatment, remedial action, and dramatic setback.

 

The authors close with a well-made point: "The mainstream press does not bill itself as an advocacy press... nevertheless, its framing... was no more neutral or impartial than the framing by the black press." While it is understood brevity is a virtue, even in academic prose, it may have been desirable for the authors to include more direct quotations from both the mainstream press (from the three mainstream sources, there were zero direct quotes,) as well as from the black press (only two quotations, drawn from a total of twenty-two papers). The statistical analysis is of interest to a point, but percentages alone are dry and lifeless, whereas the words themselves, taken from their original sources, may carry more power to illustrate the authors' underlying point about the contrast between the two types of sources. Much is left unexplored, and another page given to examples would not have added interminably to this student's reading. Red-blooded prose better holds the attention, every time.

 

(Reviewed by Paul Russell Laverack) 

 

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