In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and evidence of health disparities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, hundreds of state and local governments across the United States declared that racism was a public health crisis. In two recent reports by the Collaborative on Media Messaging for Health and Social Policy (COMM), researchers analyzed more than 250 of these declarations to understand both the political dynamics behind them and their association with local TV news media attention. They also examined shifts in local media coverage of issues related to race.

In the first study, published in Urban Affairs Review, the research team found an association between local declarations of racism as a public health threat and local news attention to the topic of racism.

University of Minnesota School of Public Health Professor Sarah Gollust, the senior author on the study, said the declarations that led to a short-term surge in how often racism was discussed in local TV news could impact future discussions on race and equity in the U.S.

“These large increases in attention to racism in local TV news following the declarations might have shaped public perceptions in ways that we don’t entirely understand,” said Gollust, “but that might continue to be important as we consider the ongoing political issues surrounding health, equity, and racial disparities in today’s climate.”

In the second report, the team found that beginning in 2020, local TV news outlets paid outsized attention to the issue of racial justice, but by 2025, counter-messaging in opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts has eclipsed that coverage, reaching the same level of attention that racism-related issues had in 2020.

The research team started tracking news coverage of COVID health disparities during the same year that Floyd’s death sparked mass protests and a debate about structural racism.

“You have these two very serious events that overlap [and] lay bare to everyone—not just the researcher community who had been documenting racial inequalities in health outcomes for a long time—how these two things are interconnected,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, co-director of Wesleyan Media Project and co-author of the research.

To conduct their study, the COMM team analyzed keywords in news coverage by over 800 local stations nationwide from 2020 through spring 2025. Those keywords included “structural racism,” “critical race theory,” and “DEI,” among others. While coverage of issues related to structural racism was quite prominent in 2020, it began to decline in tandem with the gubernatorial race in Virginia, when Gov. Glenn Youngkin campaigned against critical race theory.  While local news coverage in opposition to racial justice efforts had started rising before President Donald Trump took office in 2025, it spiked significantly thereafter. The mix of executive orders opposing DEI and subsequent news coverage spurred a dramatic shift. In mid-2025, there were more than 600 stories with mentions of DEI compared to 800 stories about structural racism in 2020. “It’s noteworthy that the recent attention to DEI is nearly as large as the initial coverage of racial injustice,” said Fowler.

The finding confirms a pattern of progress on social justice followed by a period of backlash. While there is some evidence that this backlash has eroded support for racial justice initiatives, it is notable, however, that coverage of DEI is more likely to be contested by advocates speaking out against rollbacks and that most Americans disapprove of ending DEI policies. Further, experimental studies by the COMM team have found that there are ways to talk about racial equity that bolster support for those policies without producing backlash, said Fowler.

COMM is a partnership between Wesleyan, Cornell University, and the University of Minnesota. The report on tracking news attention was also co-authored by Meiqing Zhang, Natália de Paula Moreira, Breeze Floyd, Steven Moore, Yujin Kim, Furkan Cakmak, Neil Lewis, Jr., and Jeff Niederdeppe. The Urban Affairs Review study was also co-authored by de Paula Moreira, Floyd, and Moore.

A version of this article originally appeared on Wesleyan University’s website.