Dr. Miya Williams Fayne
Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the Black press, digital journalism and race.
Email: miya.fayne@wisc.edu
X / Twitter: @WilliamsFayne
Prof. Danielle K. Brown
The 1855 Professor of Community and Urban Journalism at Michigan State University. Her research explores the intersection of journalism, identity and narrative change.
Email: dkbrown@msu.edu
Twitter: @danikathleen
U.S. Election 2024
51. The powers that aren’t: News organizations and the 2024 election (Dr Nik Usher)
52. Newspaper presidential endorsements: Silence during consequential moment in history (Dr Kenneth Campbell)
53. Trump after news: a moral voice in an empty room? (Prof Matt Carlson, Prof Sue Robinson, Prof Seth C. Lewis)
54. Under media oligarchy: profit and power trumped democracy once again (Prof Victor Pickard)
55. The challenge of pro-democracy journalism (Prof Stephen D. Reese)
56. Grievance and animosity: Fracturing the digital news ecosystem (Dr Scott A. Eldridge II)
57. Considering the risk of attacks on journalists during the U.S. election (Dr Valerie Belair-Gagnon)
58. What can sentiment in cable news coverage tell us about the 2024 campaign? (Dr Gavin Ploger, Dr Stuart Soroka)
59. The case for happy election news: Why it matters and what stands in the way (Dr Ruth Palmer, Prof Stephanie Edgerly, Prof Emily K. Vraga)
60. Broadcast television use and the 2024 U.S. presidential election (Jessica Maki, Prof Michael W. Wagner)
61. Kamala Harris' representation in mainstream and Black media (Dr Miya Williams Fayne, Prof Danielle K. Brown)
62. Team Trump and the altercation at the Arlington military cemetery (Dr Natalie Jester)
63. Pulling their punches: On the limits of sports metaphor in political media (Prof Michael L. Butterworth)
News media remain critical to public understanding of election-related information and candidates. Candidate representations matter, and in many ways inform much of the public discourse that shapes how people vote. Despite their historical differences, mainstream and Black news outlets were often aligned in their coverage of Kamala Harris, providing contextualized and fair coverage of her campaign. However, the media genres differed in their coverage of Harris’ loss with mainstream using problematic framing and the Black press providing supportive coverage.
Harris has been in the media spotlight for decades, though her ascension to some of the most powerful political positions in the United States as the first Black/South Asian/Mixed-Race/woman to hold these positions helped her maintain novelty throughout her tenure. However, scholars of gender have long described the double bind women face when entering politics. They find that necessary character traits for quality leadership like strength, compassion, and competence are assessed in ways that also diminish women in power. This “damned-if-you-do/don’t” bind helps explain the double standards women are often held to in politics. Currently, the best examples of double binds in the media appear in media spaces that are ideologically asymmetrical from women candidates. For Harris, conservative news outlets, such as Fox News, produced racist and sexist content that either intentionally demonized her, or included depictions that placed her in a double bind.
Mainstream news outlets have historically and contemporaneously stereotyped or ignored the Black community in ways that exacerbate double binds and other consequential stereotypes. Contrarily, the Black press has always worked to counter inadequate mainstream media narratives about Black people. Black news outlets center humanizing coverage of Black people and include historical contexts for events like the Black Lives Matter protests well before the mainstream considers these components. Black achievement is core to the Black press’s news values, and as such they are more likely to cover the accomplishments of Black people than white-led media counterparts.
The differences in the histories of Black and mainstream news organizations reflect the widely different purposes and approaches they have served, but it’s difficult to discern the two as distinctly different when it comes to Harris’s presidential campaign coverage. In both kinds of news outlets, you’ll find examples of in-depth coverage about Harris’s ascension to the Democratic presidential candidacy. In August, Essence, a popular Black women’s magazine, gave her the September/October cover. The same month, Harris appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, donning the title “Her Moment.” Both mainstream and Black press outlets found ways to integrate culturally specific topics such as Harris being a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and an alumna of Howard University, a Historically Black College and University. While overall the mainstream produced more coverage about Harris than the Black press, given their larger staffs, preliminary evidence suggests journalism from both kinds of news outlets included elements that humanized Harris during her campaign.
While news narrative patterns about Harris appear promising, news outlet endorsements were haphazard in the 2024 election among both mainstream and Black media. While some mainstream newspapers, like the New York Times and Boston Globe, and Black press outlets, like The Grio and The Atlanta Inquirer, made declarations in support of Harris, others broke tradition and declined to make endorsements. Mainstream newspapers, such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, chose not to endorse anyone and some Black news outlets also withheld endorsements. For example, the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), which is the Black press’ trade organization representing over 200 publications, previously endorsed Barack Obama for both of his election campaigns but withheld an official endorsement of Harris. These non-endorsements created discourse about the news media’s role in democracy, and for some it signaled the lackluster support for the first Black woman to secure the presidential nomination for the Democratic party.
There will certainly be decades of research that looks into media representations of Harris’s campaign and its impact on the outcome of the 2024 election. Day of and post-election coverage is where we predict researchers will find the clearest differences in press narrative trends. The mainstream focused on traditional and problematic strategies, such as relying on horse race framing. News anchors and headlines consistently compared her performance to Biden, speculating her “underperformance.” Narratives abandoned previously discussed challenges and institutional barriers the vice president faced as she took on the campaign for president just months before the election. They also diminished her extensive role in the Biden campaign’s “overperformance” that led to the 2020 win where she served as vice president. Meanwhile, the Black press’s coverage stayed true to its legacy, humanizing Harris, celebrating her work, describing her as “overwhelmingly qualified” and recognizing the impact her loss had on its audiences. They covered her concession speech and expressed hope that she might run again while also acknowledging America’s history of racism and sexism. In the end, both the Black and mainstream media returned to divergent patterns that aligned with their histories – a realignment that, in some ways, mirrored the outcome of the election.