ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we continue to explore the “cult of personality” by focusing on the oversaturation of the Court’s docket found in chapter 3. Here, we analyze the coverage of the Court’s docket in terms of the media’s treatment of those cases that have been identified as “landmark rulings” rather than by issue areas. The key question is how might the public’s image of the Court be affected by media coverage of both types of cases when they are highly salient (politically, legally, or both)? Since landmark cases tend to deal with profound social and legal issues, oversaturation on these issues may lead to a more realistic representation of the Court’s work. However, if the coverage of landmark cases is skewed toward the politically charged case, regardless of its legal implications, the image of the Court may be distorted, as we found in chapters 2 and 3, as will be the public’s perception of the Court’s work. In this chapter, we begin with an examination of landmark cases as a whole, describing overall differences within this subset of cases compared to the other cases on the Court’s decisional docket that the media covered, but that were not necessarily recognized by history as seminal. We then focus more narrowly on the coverage of the landmark cases for each term—the issue areas highlighted and the major decisions that garner media attention. We end each of these separate analyses with a comparison between the landmark cases and the non-landmark cases covered in that term, specifically focusing on which cases serve as “news pegs,” 1 to tease out any additional significant differences in coverage of these major cases.
