Racism as a Public Health Crisis: How Declarations Shape Local TV News Attention to Racism

Since 2020, many local, state, and federal governments have passed resolutions or formal statements that officially declared racism as a public health crisis in their communities. These declarations have created opportunities to raise public awareness about the harmful consequences of racism and have provided a platform for advocates and policymakers to propose policies and allocate resources to address the problem. This study contributes to our understanding of these declarations in two ways. First, it examines the political and sociodemographic factors that predict the enactment of a declaration at the media market-level. Second, it analyzes the impact of such declarations on local TV news coverage of racism. We find that markets with a higher percentage of votes for Trump in 2016 were less likely to enact a declaration, as were markets with higher percentages of uninsured and Black populations. Time series models indicate that declarations were associated with more attention to racism on local TV news, particularly in the short term, which is an important political consequence of enacting declarations.