Does the tonality of US newscasts indicate race and gender discrimination?

ABSTRACT

We analyse possible discrimination regarding gender and race in the tonality of media coverage of four US newscasts. In particular, we estimate the tonality of news reports from ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX News and distinguish between four distinct combinations of race and gender of public officials. Our results indicate that media reporting on black men (and possibly on black women) is biased in comparison to coverage on white men. Moreover, the coverage of FOX News tends to be more negative on non-white people in general, whereas, for ABC, NBC and CBS, the average reporting on non-white female individuals is more negative than on white males and also more negative than on female whites.

KEYWORDS:

• Media bias
• tonality
• discrimination
• government bias

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J16
• J15
• L82

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

³ The accuracy and reliability of the coding was regularly checked by Media Tenor, both with standard tests and random spot checks, with a guaranteed minimum accuracy of 0.85. See Dewenter, Dulleck, and Thomas (2020) for a more comprehensive description of the data.

⁴ For our analysis, we distinguish solely between females and males as two distinct gender groups, which is entirely due to simplicity and data availability. It should be noted, however, that this distinction should not be exclusive of other types of genders and personal identification. This also holds true for the various types of ethnic affiliation, which is represented in a simplified form in our media reports.

⁵ We also used negativity as the dependent variable and obtain mixed results: Coefficients of FOX and ABC do not change in significance and signs whereas NBC and CBS become insignificant in the full sample.

⁶ However, the results for maleblack and femalewhite do not change when excluding reports on Condoleezza Rice.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported that there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.