News Coverage and Public Opinion toward Black Women Political Elites

• In Event: The Media's Role in Marginalization

Abstract

Recent scholarship in the political science literature has taken a closer look into understanding the extent to which intersectionality has critical implications for the experiences of women of color in the political arena, and Black women in particular.This study accordingly examines the extent to which Black women political elites face a unique combination of disadvantages on account of their intersectionality identity through a relatively understudied lens: in the context of news coverage. More precisely, this project considers whether news coverage surrounding Black women political figures is uniquely different to that of their counterparts (Black men, White men, and White women), in addition to the extent to which exposure toward negative news coverage disproportionately impacts public evaluations towards them. Furthermore, the main research question at hand is as follows: Do Black women political elites encounter a unique disadvantage in the context of the news that their counterparts do not? In order to answer the aforementioned question, I implement two studies: 1) a series of content-analyses on news transcripts derived from LexisNexis, and 2) a survey experiment fielded with Dynata in April 2022.

In order to first test whether Black female political elites encounter news media coverage that is uniquely different to that of their race-gender counterparts, I examine three primary factors: (1) frequency of coverage, (2) sentiment of coverage, and (3) the primary topics that emerge in news coverage using a series of content analyses of news transcripts on ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and MSNBC news surrounding prominent political figures. In order to do so, I first create a “political figures” dictionary containing the names of twelve prominent political figures, who are carefully matched according to political rank and status. I then create a corpus that allows me to analyze the transcripts at the sentence-level. In total, approximately 400,000 sentences are analyzed across all four of the networks. The time frame of analysis spans 1990-2021, therefore allowing for a broader and larger scale examination.After examining the content-analytic data surrounding news coverage of Black women political elites, I then implement a survey experiment with Dynata to test whether exposure towards negative news coverage surrounding fictitious candidates has disproportionately more negative implications for respondent evaluations of Black women political elites. In order to build a nuanced set of hypotheses, I examine the literatures surrounding media treatment of women of color political elites in the news, as well as the literatures surrounding the impact of news media exposure on public opinion.

This study largely builds upon the findings in Gershon (2012), which demonstrate that Black and Latina congresswomen are sometimes subject to lower levels of and more negative newspaper coverage when compared to their White and male counterparts.I also look toward previous studies which have found that Black and female political figures, respectively, are sometimes subject to harsher media treatment relative to their non-Black and male counterparts (e.g., Tolley 2015; Eargle et al. 2008; Dunn-Jensen and Stroh 2007). In terms of the impact of news exposure on public attitudes, I also examine the literatures surrounding the impact of negative news on public opinion towards Black and female Americans, as well as the ways in which “priming” and “framing” techniques can have meaningful effects on public attitudes. For example, I look toward studies which suggest that the use of “priming” in news stories where racialized language is used have important consequences for public attitudes towards political candidates (e.g., Valentino et al. 2018; Valentino et al. 2002). Overall, the results of this study are complex: one of the primary findings to emerge is that news coverage surrounding Black women political elites more frequently focuses on issues surrounding race and racial identity, relative to their counterparts. Additionally, I find that exposure to negative news coverage produces disproportionately more negative consequences for public opinion toward both Black male and female candidates, relative to their White counterparts. However, I find limited evidence for the expectation(s) that Black women political elites are subject to more negative news coverage relative to their counterpart groups and that exposure to negative news coverage produces disproportionately more negative consequences for public evaluations of Black women political elites. Furthermore, the findings of this study reveal important information surrounding the nuanced experiences of Black women political elites, while also contributing critical knowledge to the race, gender, political communication, and public opinion literatures.

Author

• Sydney Carr, College of the Holy Cross