Political and Media Factors in the Evolution of the Media’s Role in U.S. Supreme Court Nominations
Keywords:
U.S. Supreme Court, judicial selection, media, Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos, selección judicial, medios de comunicaciónAbstract
The selection of U.S. Supreme Court justices has become a highly media-oriented process both in the presidential selection and Senate confirmation stages. In the former stage, the White House uses the media to signal consideration of certain nominees, while interest groups publicly pressure the president to appoint favoured candidates or threaten confirmation fights over unacceptable candidates. In the confirmation stage, the White House, and nominee supporters, battle nominee opponents through image-making strategies intended to shape media coverage of the nominee. This paper will describe and explain the role of the media in the current nomination process, briefly assess why the media’s role has evolved in the past half century, and also predict how those roles would be changed under differing reform scenarios for Supreme Court nominations.
La selección de los magistrados de la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos se ha convertido en un proceso muy influenciado por los medios de comunicación, tanto en la elección presidencial como en las etapas de confirmación del Senado. En la primera etapa, la Casa Blanca utiliza los medios de comunicación para señalar los candidatos que se están considerando, mientras que los grupos de interés presionan públicamente al presidente para que designe a sus candidatos de su preferencia, o amenaza con luchas ante la confirmación de candidatos no afines. En la fase de confirmación, la Casa Blanca y los partidarios del magistrado seleccionados se enfrentan a sus oponentes a través de una estrategia de creación de imagen, para determinar la cobertura mediática del candidato. Este artículo describe y explica el papel de los medios de comunicación en el proceso actual de nombramiento, evalúa brevemente por qué el papel de los medios de comunicación ha evolucionado en el último medio siglo, y también predice cómo cambiaría este papel ante diferentes escenarios de reforma del proceso de nombramiento de la Corte Suprema.
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