Depictions of Black Americans in U.S. Television News, 1990-2020

How are Black Americans depicted in U.S. television news? This paper provides an empirical investigation into the news topics in which Black Americans are mentioned, or not mentioned, across nearly the entire population of network television news content from 1990 to 2020. Previous literatures suggest that Black Americans are most likely to appear in stories about (a) crime and violence, (b) poverty and welfare, (c) civil rights and protest, and (d) sports. Based on structural topic modelling of news transcripts, we find broad support for some of these expectations, across a much larger corpus than has been available in prior work. Indeed, we find that Black Americans are most likely to appear in topics such as sports, and criminal violence, and are largely absent from areas such as business and health. Our findings have important implications for the study and practice of journalism, and for our understanding of the nature and effects of racial depictions in U.S. media.