Media coverage of issues important to non-majority populations and marginalized groups has a checkered history. For many groups, the first hurdle is getting the media to pay attention. Once coverage begins, message control is yet another hurdle. The current political climate is characterized by hyper-partisanship and division. Public opinion on the presidency and the recent acrimonious Senate hearings to fill a Supreme Court vacancy with Judge Kavanaugh¹ epitomize this division. Powerful, partisan individuals are heavily scrutinizing media influence and content. Understanding the impact of media coverage on the politics of groups and identities is particularly essential when unprecedented criticism of the media comes from the highest levels of government.

Social scientists have a long-standing interest in the media’s influence on citizens’ understanding of public policy. Media coverage of issues impacts the passage of laws, the extension of rights to minority groups, and the public’s perceptions of minority groups. For many, media effects on policy is a matter of survival, and can happen in real time. Policy changes addressing policing communities of color as a response to media framing of the Black Lives Matter Movement, or public support for same-sex marriage influenced by advertising campaigns are recent examples.

We also know that media coverage can have unintended consequences on the public. Sensational coverage of events can encourage citizens to make unnecessary policy demands. Take the emphasis on the migrant caravan immediately prior to the 2018 midterm election as an example. Media portrayals of migrants as a security threat can influence people’s judgments about whether immigration is an important problem facing the country and can result in demands for increased securitization of the border. The sensational focus on the caravan obscures the fact that the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. is lower now than at any point since 2004.² In addition, the media are often blamed for shaping negative attitudes towards minority groups when media effects are sometimes small, and in some cases, not present; and too often scholars do not consider the ways in which the media favorably construct majority groups.

We follow up our recently published PGI Dialogues section on Media and the Politics of Groups and Identities in issue 6.4 with another set of short articles and review essays exploring groups, identities, and media content and effects. Again, we are grateful for the support of lead editors Nadia Brown and Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, to publish two Dialogues. Our original plan of curating one Dialogues section became difficult after our Call for Papers received over 50 abstracts. In this section, we present a series of brief peer-reviewed articles and two review essays. We hope this body of work will generate future research.

Articles in this dialogue address the impact of media coverage on a range of people, policy, and institutions: public officials (Arora, Delshad, and Phoenix), the public (Flores), the media (Billard), social welfare policies (Clawson and Jett), and even criminals (Rios and Rivera).

Starting with the influence of media coverage on policies governing policing, Arora, Delshad, and Phoenix examine framing of the BLM movement and police shootings. They identify frames that trigger legislators to act in response to police killings of people of color and subsequent protests of police killings. They show that local policymakers were compelled to respond when the media question police responses and tactics, and when frames are sympathetic to protestors. Billard connects media coverage of transgender issues to intermedia agenda-setting between digital and legacy media. Coverage trends in one media type influence coverage in the other. On some issues like anti-transgender violence, digital media coverage causes legacy media to cover the same issues. Conversely, legacy media’s coverage of third gender issues influenced coverage in digital outlets.

In another important issue, Flores shows that televised media campaigns about same-sex marriage benefit those who want to preserve current policy. Those who oppose same-sex couples marrying have an advantage in influencing the public. Pivoting to the effects of media coverage on criminals, Rios and Rivera expand our understanding of the effects of media coverage by examining the impact of media coverage of murders committed by drug cartels in Mexico on subsequent murders. They find that once the media report horrific drug-related murders, drug cartels responded with a willingness to showcase increased brutality in public spaces.

Finally, Clawson and Jett draw our attention to media coverage of the majority racial group in the U.S. They document the whiteness of news magazine coverage of Social Security and Medicare recipients and argue that this construction impacts public opinion by heightening the popularity of Social Security and Medicare. This pattern of coverage is in sharp contrast to the way in which the media use black faces to portray poverty and social welfare.

Finally, the Dialogues section concludes with two review essays. Whitesell explores strategies interest groups use to communicate with stakeholders and remain relevant in an evolving media landscape where social media is the primary way to communicate and advocate for causes. In the second review essay, Jackson challenges scholars who work at the intersection of media, race, and crime to revisit the thematic-episodic approach to framing. Jackson’s review is timely as the country wrestles with changing norms on explicit and implicit racism.

We hope this collection of articles provides renewed perspectives on media coverage of the politics of groups and identities and inspires future research. We look forward to engaging conversations through PGI’s social media accounts! Instagram @PGI_WPSA; Twitter @PGI_WPSA; Facebook @PGI2016.