Latino Portrayals in Local News Media: Underrepresentation, Negative Stereotypes, and Institutional Predictors of Coverage

Abstract

Given the rise in negative rhetoric about Latinos in the U.S., it is essential to examine whether this negative tone extends to general, local news as well. An analysis of 2426 news articles drawn from 55 local newspapers in 2015 reveals several important findings. First, despite the intense spotlight on Latinos, they are still underrepresented in local news media. Relative to the other ethnic groups and whites, Latinos are more likely to be portrayed through negative stereotypes. However, the probability of this negative coverage is smaller for news media with a big proportion of Latino audiences, or for publicly-owned media outlets.

Keywords:

• Latinos
• negative stereotypes
• local news
• newsroom diversity
• minority audiences
• media ownership

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Johanna Dunaway, Paru Saha, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Chao Chen for his technical help with Python.

Notes

1. In 2015, ASNE focused on smaller newspapers with circulation figures below 50,000. This sampling strategy was due to their presumption that “the number of employees in those newsrooms [smaller newspapers] tends to vary less than at larger newspapers” (see ASNE for more details).

2. Note that these news article samples do not include reviews, obituaries, and letters to editor.

3. A computer scientist was employed to conduct the Python procedure, who is an expert on Python and thus controlled for technical problems.

4. Note that while we admit the unavoidable error of automatic coding, we did not drop any articles. This is because we cannot human code all articles, such that dropping several articles without a complete review of all may introduce other unsystematic errors.

5. Though not a focus of this present study, we also created another three dummy variables to capture whether a news article covers “positive race stereotypes only,” “both positive and negative stereotypes,” or “neither positive nor negative stereotypes,” which were not used here.

6. Note that the 2015 population by state data were not available by the time we conducted this study, so we used the latest 2014 data instead. In addition, while the population by state data do not provide the most accurate measurement of target audiences, they are still the most appropriate method given the fact that many big local dailies (i.e. Houston Chronicle) often circulate in other cities other than the place of production.

7. To check for the robustness of our findings, we also performed baseline models that included only the ethnic group variables and it revealed the same result as shown here.