The rise of and demand for identity-oriented media coverage

Abstract

While some assert that social identities have become more salient in American media coverage, existing evidence is largely anecdotal. An increased emphasis on social identities has important political implications, including for polarization and representation. We first document the rising salience of different social identities using natural language processing tools to analyze all tweets from 19 media outlets (2008–2021) alongside 553,078 URLs shared on Facebook. We then examine one potential mechanism: Outlets may highlight meaningful social identities—race/ethnicity, gender, religion, or partisanship—to attract readers through various social and psychological pathways. We find that identity cues are associated with increases in some forms of engagement on social media. To probe causality, we analyze 3,828 randomized headline experiments conducted via Upworthy. Headlines mentioning racial/ethnic identities generated more engagement than headlines that did not, with suggestive evidence for other identities. Identity-oriented media coverage is growing and rooted partly in audience demand.