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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Dangers Of Press Clause Dicta, Ronnell Andersen Jones
The Dangers Of Press Clause Dicta, Ronnell Andersen Jones
Faculty Scholarship
The United States Supreme Court has engaged in an unusual pattern of excessive dicta in cases involving the press. Indeed, a close examination of such cases reveals that it is one of the most consistent, defining characteristics of the U.S. Supreme Court’s media law jurisprudence in the last half century. The Court’s opinions in cases involving the media, while almost uniformly reaching conclusions based on other grounds, regularly include language about the constitutional or democratic character, duty, value, or role of the press — language that could be, but ultimately is not, significant to the constitutional conclusion reached. Although scholars …
Viewpoint Diversity And Media Consolidation: An Empirical Study, Daniel E. Ho, Kevin M. Quinn
Viewpoint Diversity And Media Consolidation: An Empirical Study, Daniel E. Ho, Kevin M. Quinn
Faculty Articles
One of the central predicates of legal regulation of media ownership is that ownership consolidation reduces substantive viewpoint diversity. Appellate courts and, in turn, the Federal Communications Commission have increasingly demanded evidence for this convergence hypothesis, but extant empirical measures of viewpoint diversity sidestep the problem, ignoring diversity, viewpoints, or both. Our Article develops and offers a finely tuned, time-varying statistical measure of editorial viewpoint diversity, based on a new database of over 1600 editorial positions in twenty-five top newspapers from 1988-2004. Using this new measure, we assess the validity of the convergence hypothesis by examining the evolution of editorial …