Female candidates running for president are consistently being described in the media more negatively than their male counterparts. That’s what we’ve concluded after an analysis of 130 articles from mainstream news outlets. It’s a disconcerting trend in the 2020 election coverage.
We pointed this out in our first Storybench 2020 Election Coverage Tracker update last month. But with the addition of 70 more articles to our database, the picture has become even clearer. Sanders and Booker maintain their perch on the top of the overall sentiment rankings with O’Rourke right behind them. Warren, Klobuchar, Harris, and Gillibrand all place under them. Again, these findings need to be taken with a grain of salt. The sentiment scoring is imperfect, and despite doubling our dataset, it is still too small to draw any certain conclusions. But the findings beg the question: What exactly is causing this disparity in media portrayal?[…]
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