Examining the Meidia Coverage of the Women that have been Nominated to the Supreme Court.

I will be using the New York Times API to examing their coverage of the five women that have been nomiated to the Supreme Court: Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elana Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Amy Coney-Barrett. This will invovle examing New York Times articles between August 19, 1981 to October 27th, 2020.

I will use some NLP tools such as sorting out the most popular adjectives used in the artciles to describe the Justices. I will then compare the ustices that were nominated by Republican presidents(O’COnnor and Coney Barrett) to the Justices nominated by Democratic presidents(Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor).

The article ‘Political and Media Factors in the Evolution of the Media’s Role’ by Ricahrd Davis examined how changing media and public opinon has allowed the role of the media to play a more significant factor in Supreme Court nominations. The author examines articles from the New York Times and looks at Justice Kagan’s nomiation was generally considered “posiitve.” However, the author uses articles in a more a qualitative or historical approach. I believe that using a text as data, more specifically NLP approach, would allow for me to examine the langauge used to the describe the women on the Court with more nuance since I can look at specific words instead of big picutre ideas.