UC Berkeley School of Public Health: News coverage of racism as a public health crisis
Date: March 04, 2025 at 12:10 - 1:00
Berkeley Media Studies Group Director Lori Dorfman and Media Researcher, Hina Mahmood presented research findings on BMSG’s study of news coverage of racism as a public health crisis in a webinar for the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. The research, conducted in partnership with The Praxis Project, examined the news to see whether the coverage of the declarations emphasized remedies to the long-standing health consequences of racism.
From a national sample of news coverage between 2019 to 2021, we found a notable increase in news coverage during the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, but coverage dropped after the month of June. One key finding was that government representatives appeared in almost every article about the declarations, while community voices were nearly absent from the coverage. To help the public and policy makers understand the public health crisis of racism, those proposing new declarations should engage with communities working to eliminate structural racism and together make concerted efforts to generate news coverage, without relying on acts of violence against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.
Related resources
- Equity in action: Assessing the role of community in declarations of racism as a public health crisis report
- “We Have to Move Quickly to Cement This Willingness for Change”: News Narratives About Declarations of Racism as a Public Health Crisis, 2019–2021
- From words to action: Can local policies and declarations address racism as a public health issue?