This should set off all kinds of alarms. It's simply not ethical to have a press dominated by white men in Texas or anywhere. A diverse news room by race/ethnicity and gender holds enormous promise for better and more complete, non-biased accounts.
The opposite is white supremacy and white privilege. I'm not at all surprised by this, but certainly disappointed. What will it take, I always wonder?
-Angela Valenzuela
Report finds coverage of Texas politics dominated by white, male sources
An analysis of news coverage during the 2020 Texas primary finds journalists overwhelmingly relied on white, male sources for their stories.
The report by found that in news coverage of the U.S. Senate primary in Texas, more than 71 percent of political sources were white and more than 71 percent were male.
To arrive at the findings, Progress Texas created a dataset of 416 news articles relevant to the U.S. Senate primary race in Texas between Nov. 9, 2019, to March 8, 2020. Among those news articles, 107 unique political sources were quoted. Of those 107 quoted political sources, only six Black sources were interviewed.
“Particularly, it is alarming that we only found one Texas media outlet that interviewed a Black political source about the U.S. Senate race,” wrote Progress Texas. “This is even more surprising when one considers that two of the leading four candidates were black.”
Likewise, an Asian source was only interviewed 5 times. The report said Abhi Rahman, spokesman for the Texas Democratic Party, made up four of those instances.
The findings mirror the results of another by Progress Texas that found seven political experts were almost exclusively interviewed by Texas media.
Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images
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