An inquiry into media bias during the 2020 vice-presidential campaign: framing agents of change in the New York Times and the Washington Post coverage

Abstract

The New York Times (NYT) and the Washington Post (WP) are two of the most reputable and influential newspapers in the country. The NYT alone has 8 million subscribers and consumers of either newspaper can interact with stories from both outlets through their direct sites or social media channels (Fu & Shumate, 2017; Pew Research Center, 2021). Many in the public use these stories to form their ideas about political parties and politicians, and this substantial influence is why these two outlets were of interest for this thesis (Kane, 2020). The topic itself, how vice-presidential candidates Mike Pence and Kamala Harris were portrayed, was chosen because, as leading political figures for the United States, vice-presidential candidates and their campaigns can be vitally important to the function of democracy. This information also may yield insights into political parties and their interactions with each other and the voting public at large (McCarthy, 2019). Along these lines, this thesis used the coverage from the NYT and the WP to construct a sample of media data that can examine the possibility of media bias. From a span of 2 weeks before the election and 2 weeks after the election, 76 articles, with 42 from the NYT and 34 from the WP, were chosen. The thesis used JASP, a software program for statistical modeling, to carry out a series of analyses focused on differences between coverage based on Pence and Harris. Results demonstrate significant differences in coverage of change associated with each candidate, and how race and gender were framed in relation to Pence or Harris. The findings of this thesis break new ground in understanding how these vice-presidential candidates were covered in the highly contentious and polarized 2020 election. In so doing, they also shed additional light on bias in media coverage.