It All Begins With a Name: Examining News During the Ketanji Brown Jackson Judicial Nomination

ABSTRACT

After winning the US presidency, Joe Biden fulfilled a promise and put forward the name of Ketanji Brown Jackson as a nominee to the highest court in the nation on 25 February 2022. The purpose of this study is to explore media coverage of the historic confirmation process for the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court. In recent years, US politics have expanded to include more Black women, who have been making historic firsts. We argue that media coverage either upholds or rejects this shift of intersectional identities in the political realm due to the prevalence of white, patriarchal ideology within the US context. By conducting a discourse analysis and an experiment, this study centers on how race and gender affect political news coverage and attitudes. Study 1 documents that although new coverage emphasized Jackson’s historic first, and occasionally included voices of other Black women, it greatly emphasized ideological divisions and political strategy over the course of the hearing. Study 2 found that news frames had minimal effects on Americans’ attitudes toward the nomination. The endorsement of a white expert, or the endorsement of a liberal expert when Black empowerment was emphasized, boosted support for confirmation.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• gender
• intersectionality
• representation
• judiciary
• democracy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Florida, College of Journalism and Communications.