Introducing the Trans News Initiative: Tracking How the Media Covers Trans Communities
Trans people and our place in society are at the center of a fierce political debate, legislative attacks, and widespread misinformation. As public discourse shapes policy and perception, the accuracy of news coverage matters more than ever.
Introducing the Trans News Initiative
The Trans News Initiative is a new project in collaboration with Polygraph and the University of Miami's School of Communication dedicated to tracking and analyzing news coverage of trans communities across the United States. By providing ongoing data and in-depth analysis, the initiative empowers journalists, media organizations, and researchers to understand how stories about trans people are being told—and where coverage falls short.
“We wanted a tool that would be a mirror for journalists,” Kae Petrin, a cofounder and the president of TJA, told the Columbia Journalism Review.
The Data
The tool analyzes more than 190,000 articles published by national news outlets in the U.S., which includes state papers that are read nationally.
Top-level findings include:
- Some of the most-covered stories in national news concerned rhetorical debates, largely framed around "cancel culture” involving pop culture figures such as Dave Chappelle and J.K. Rowling.
- Stories with frames of community resilience, resistance, and solutions or social change were the least-covered of the subject areas.
- Since 2020, coverage of trans people in sports has nearly tripled; we also see significant increases in coverage of trans youth & parental rights, ideology & culture wars topics, and actions taken by the U.S. federal government. Coverage of pop culture & creativity or political resilience, resistance, & solutions has dwindled.
“The Trans News Initiative is a data-driven mirror for news organizations, allowing them to examine themselves. It can help them identify the narratives they have prioritized in the past few years when covering transgender people, and which topics and themes they have downplayed or neglected,” said Alberto Cairo, Knight Chair in Infographics and Data Visualization at the University of Miami School of Communication, who funded the project and guided its conception and development. “By detecting and exploring these patterns in the collected and visualized data, I hope journalists will change how they write and speak about the trans community.”
“The data supports what trans communities have been saying for years: too much news coverage is focused on the most sensational events and not enough centers around trans people themselves,” said Jan Diehm, journalist-engineer with Polygraph, the data journalism studio that developed the TNI tool. “We found that there were nearly eight times more pop-culture-related articles compared to stories about resilience, resistance and solutions. It's also important to keep in mind that this data shows the types of stories about trans communities that ARE being covered in the news. So many important stories aren't being covered at all.”
The announcement of the TNI tool follows a recent report TJA conducted with Berkeley Media Studies Group on how journalists covered the attack on trans rights in Trump’s first 100 days.
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