The Role of Minority Journalists, Candidates, and Audiences in Shaping Race-Related Campaign News Coverage

Abstract

The question of whether press coverage of racial/ethnic minorities has improved remains. This study tackles it by examining (a) how journalists’ race/ethnicity affects campaign news coverage of race-related issues and (b) whether the nature of coverage is moderated by minority candidates and the racial composition of audiences. We pair local news coverage of 3,400 state legislative candidates with news data from 663 news outlets. We find newsroom diversity by itself does not influence the coverage of race-related issues. But in areas with large numbers of minority audiences, media outlets with diverse newsrooms are significantly more likely to cover race-related issues.