Journalist Identity and Selective Exposure: The Effects of Racial and Ethnic Diversity in News Staff

ABSTRACT

Newsrooms are challenged with representing a diverse public, yet news staff are not always diverse themselves. Drawing from research on selective exposure along lines of race and ethnicity, this study explores how journalists’ race or ethnicity affects an individual’s likelihood of reading a news story and feelings of media representation. We find little evidence that different racial and ethnic groups respond differently to hearing and seeing bylines from journalists sharing their race or ethnicity than bylines that do not. In one study, Black participants are more likely to read an article written by a journalist who shares their race or ethnicity than one that does not. In another study, Hispanic news consumers are less likely to read an article written by a Hispanic journalist than a non-Hispanic journalist, although across several replication attempts, these results fail to replicate. We discuss the implications of these studies for selective exposure research and how news organizations display racial and ethnic diversity to their readers.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2024.2330395.

Notes

¹ Based on research by Pew Research Center (Noe-Bustamante et al., 2020), we reference this community as Hispanic, but we acknowledge the validity of alternative language such as Latino, Latina, and LatinX.

² We use a phone survey to reach areas and residents of Chicago who are typically underrepresented in online survey research (see Yeager et al., 2011), as this was central to the broader focus of our survey.

³ The headline of the article randomly varied between ending in “Chicago” or the neighborhood in which the respondent self-identified as living. We control for this manipulation in our analyses.

⁴ We chose headline options based on a pretest conducted on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n = 324). We evaluated two headlines: one about a new park and the other about road construction. We selected the headline with above average interest amongst pretest participants.

⁵ We pretested two names per race by recording someone reading the article headlines and byline and then asking respondents to guess the race/ethnicity of the journalist. Names that were most associated with the intended race were used as shown in Appendix A in the online supplemental materials. We recruited respondents on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n = 324).

⁶ In doing so, we combined those who received no byline with those who heard a byline of a race/ethnicity not their own. We did this because our theoretical expectations are about the positive effects of hearing a name matching one’s own race/ethnicity, not the negative effects of hearing a name cueing a race/ethnicity other than your own. There were no significant differences between the non-matching names and no byline condition for Hispanic, Black, or White participants for either of our dependent variables, which further justifies this combination.

⁷ We conducted a pretest of three photos per treatment accompanied by the same names in Study 1 to a) confirm that the photos were associated with the intended race/ethnicity, b) to see if the names used in Study 1 elicited any unexpected associations, and c) to see which photo best encouraged respondents of a matching race/ethnicity to read the story. In doing so, we found that some respondents associated Jeffrey Mueller with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. For Study 2, therefore, we used Jeffrey Miller, a name that had been pre-tested in Study 1, instead of Jeffrey Mueller. Results of the pretest can be found in Online Appendix A.

⁸ To see whether one of the bylines or thumbnail photos in Study 2 cued a subgroup of each race or ethnicity with which we were unfamiliar, we asked pretest respondents an open-ended question: “Does anything come to mind when you see this journalist or read his name?” We received no reaction to the name “Juan” or “Garcia” or to either name as specific to one Hispanic/Latino country or region.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the McCormick Foundation Democracy Fund .

Notes on contributors

Emily Van Duyn

Emily Van Duyn (PhD, The University of Texas at Austin) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a research associate with the Center for Media Engagement at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores the contexts in which people receive information and talk (or do not talk) about politics.

Jay Jennings

Jay Jennings (PhD, Temple University) is a research associate at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin and a research scientist at the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the media’s role in shaping the motivation to participate in politics.

Natalie Jomini Stroud

Natalie Jomini Stroud (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies and director of the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research analyzes how people’s attitudes and beliefs both predict and are affected by the media.