A Researcher Found That Voters Might Be Less Racist and Sexist Than We Think—But Journalists Weren’t Interested in the Story

This piece was originally posted on The American Saga by Zaid Jilani.

When we think about media bias, we often think about left vs. right. Is the media biased in favor of Democrats or Republicans? Are reporters liberals or conservatives?

But another form of bias that we should think about is negativity bias. News outlets are often biased towards negative stories that paint a picture of a world that’s falling apart.

That’s a bias that University of Oxford researcher Sanne van Oosten ran into headfirst when she recently published research looking into how voters think about female and minority candidates.

Her research was based on what’s called a meta-analysis — meaning that her team collected dozens of studies and looked at what they collectively found.

Collectively, they looked at over 40 studies, seeking to figure out what voters thought about a candidate based off their first impressions. Do female and minority candidates suffer a penalty from voters compared to white or male politicians?

Her conclusion from the studies — most of which took part in the American context — was optimistic. Voters don’t penalize female and minority candidates, in fact their first impressions are even more positive about female and candidates about some minority backgrounds.

“Voters aren’t negative — in some cases [are] even positive about women, about Asian candidates, and think the same about black candidates as they do about white candidates. It’s actually quite positive,” she told me in an interview.

But reporters by and large were not interested in her results. She took to X (formerly known as Twitter) and noted that although she spoke to many reporters to discuss her results, all but one called the stories off. One journalist she talked to even told her: “people aren’t interested in good news.”

Van Oosten’s finding should be a cause for celebration. Anyone above a certain age (so maybe not you Gen Z readers out there perusing this Substack on your Apple Vision Pros) should remember how much racism and sexism there once was in our political system.

For most of my life, it was simply unthinkable that a candidate with Kamala Harris’s ethnic or gender background would be a viable candidate for the presidency.

When Barack Obama was nominated to the Democratic presidential ticket in 2008, people from coast to coast wondered: Is it really possible for a black man to be elected president?

The gravity of that question, even after it was answered, continued to weigh on even the man himself. A friend of mine who was at the White House once told me a story that Obama once walked in and noted aloud that the building was itself built by American slaves.

But I also remember a conversation I had with my friend shortly after Obama was elected. My friend was an Obama organizer whose parents had come to the United States from Jamaica. I remembered telling him that because Obama broke the glass ceiling for minority candidates, that he could president one day.

He looked at me and replied, “Now you can be president!”

I thought he was getting a little carried away — two Muslim presidents in the 21st century, are we really that lucky? — but he had a point. We were living in a very different country after Obama had been elected, and we both should’ve been very optimistic about the future of American politics.

And yet that’s not what happened. Over Obama’s two terms, Americans grew more fatalistic about racism.

In 2013, 72 percent of white adults and 66 percent of black adults said they thought relations between the two groups were very or somewhat good. By 2021, that had declined to 43 percent among white adults and just 33 percent among black adults. In poll after poll, Americans have shown remarkable pessimism about the amount of prejudice in our society.

It almost seemed like as actual prejudice was going down, concern about prejudice was going way up.

The news media seemed to play a significant role in that. Research by Musa al-Gharbi and David Rozado found a massive increase in the use of what they called “prejudice-denoting words” in the media between 2010 and 2019.

It should hardly be surprising that Americans think they live in a massively racist and sexist country if you can hardly open the newspaper without being bombarded with a story about how a lady in Central Park getting into a verbal altercation about dog walking is an indictment of all-pervasive American racism.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

“We live in really, really amazing times. It’s actually really unbelievable how much we’ve changed in the last decade, about feminist issues or anti-racist issues, really, really quite unbelievable,” van Oosten told me.

If we want people to believe that the world isn’t quite as bad as we imagine it, we have to be willing to publish the truth, even when it’s positive.