Meg Heckman, Rahul Bhargavaa, and Emily Boardman Ndulue | November 2023

Abstract: This study uses a mix of traditional and computational content analysis to track digital news coverage of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris during and immediately after the 2020 general elections. It’s well documented that female politicians, especially women of color, face biased coverage in the political press. In this paper, we explore how these dynamics play out in the modern hyper-polarized digital media landscape. Our corpus includes roughly 17,000 stories published online between August 2020 and April 2021 by news organizations we categorized along a binary axis of partisanship between Republican and Democrat. Our findings show that sexist, racialized coverage of Harris is most prevalent in news sources shared by mostly Republican voters. Coverage in news sources shared by registered Democratic voters, meanwhile, tended to treat Harris as a celebrity, often fixating on her wardrobe and personal life. We ponder implications for both gender equity in civic life and future feminist media scholarship.