/rainbow

Racial Diversity of News Coverage and the Newsroom

Primary LanguageJupyter Notebook

Rainbow: Racial Diversity of People Referred to in the News and the Newsroom

We use the Top News Data that collates news articles from news feeds from ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, LA Times, NBC, NYT, Politico, USAT, and WaPo, and ethnicolr to estimate the racial diversity of the people mentioned in the news and the newsroom.

Data suggest that African Americans and Hispanics are grossly underrepresented in the newsroom. We see a more attenuated pattern for the mentions.

Race/ethnicity of authors across all outlets.

Race/Ethnicity Percentage
nh_white 78%
nh_black 5.7%
asian 8.5%
hispanic 7.3%
other .4%

Race/ethnicity of people mentioned in the news across all outlets.

Race/Ethnicity Percentage
nh_white 73.5%
nh_black 9.5%
asian 8.6%
hispanic 8%
other .4%

For channel-wise breakdown, please refer to the notebooks.

Notebooks

Authors

Rajashekar Chintalapati and Gaurav Sood