With this chapter, Haltom and McCann begin their examination of how the institutional routines and proclivities of mass media – especially news media – shape commonsense knowledge of the U. S. civil justice system. That examination discloses that representations of civil disputing and tort litigation in news accounts resemble the narrative constructions advanced by pop reformers far more than the counter-narratives or empirical conclusions of socio-legal scholars or trial lawyers.  Analyses of almost twenty years of coverage of civil justice in five national newspapers disclose that their cumulative output strikingly reiterates tort reformers’ patterns of knowledge production and storytelling.  The authors contend that, at least for products-liability or personal-injury disputes, the institutional propensities of news media tend to retrace the instrumental perspectives of pop tort reform.


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