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Refereed Articles

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

Lea Bernhardt, Ralf Dewenter (2022),
Applied Economics Letters 30(11), 1566-1569.

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.

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Ralf Dewenter