Resurfacing Relevant Research: Coverage of VP Harris

The American news media ecosystem is famously polarized and it's easy to take for granted that partisan media on the right will cover political figures differently than partisan media on the left. In 2024, this is as true as it has ever been for Kamala Harris. It's too soon to fully study the patterns, tropes, and narratives present in this election's media cycle, but much of what we're seeing was also true in 2020, when Vice President Harris was candidate Harris. In this paper, the authors analyze more than 17,000 news pieces using qualitative and quantitative techniques to understand gender-based and race-based coverage of Harris across the political spectrum. To do this, they used Media Cloud and its publicly accessible partisanship collections, which organize news sources according to how often they're shared by self-identified Democrats and Republicans.While the results show biased coverage of Harris on both the left and right, there were stark differences in the nature of the biases. Right-wing media more often used sexist and racist frames, with common narratives including portraying her as incompetent, criticizing the way she laughs, and suggesting that she is successful only because of her romantic relationships. Left-wing media, by contrast, treated her more like a celebrity than a serious political candidate. While not as likely to attack her, they nonetheless diminished her achievements by focusing on her fashion choices, like her pearl necklaces, rather than more substantive coverage of her positions. Re-reading the study three years after it was written, it could've just as easily been published today, with many of the trends and narratives carrying forward to Harris's presidential bid.You can read "Powerful in pearls and Willie Brown’s mistress: a computational analysis of gendered news coverage of Kamala Harris on the partisan extremes"  by Meg Heckman, Rahul Bharvaga, and Emily Boardman-Ndulue in the journal Feminist Media Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2023.2280545