Community Characteristics Predict Local News Agenda Building About Racial Health Disparities

We examined market-level social and demographic characteristics and station-level factors as predictors of local television news coverage of COVID-19-related racial disparities using the theoretical lens of agenda building and the community structure theory. We analyzed closed captioning of evening news broadcasts from 758 stations tracked in all 210 media markets from February 1 2020, to November 23 2021. We systematically validated keywords to extract news and used supervised machine learning to identify relevant content. Linear mixed models showed that more coverage of racial disparity in local television news was associated with a lower Trump vote share and larger Black and Indigenous populations. Contrary to expectations, Sinclair-owned stations were more likely to cover such news during the early pandemic wave (February to early June 2020). Network affiliations were significantly associated with the likelihood of covering racial disparities, though the direction and magnitude of these associations varied across pandemic waves. We discuss implications with particular attention to media markets that were less likely to cover racial health disparities.