Understanding coverage of rights claiming in LGBTQ+ media

The media play a major role in shaping individuals' attitudes and perspectives on law and legality. This is particularly true concerning specialty media serving marginalized communities, where the media acts as advocates of the community, providing information of particular interest to the community and using frames, arguments, and sources that bolster the community's interests and values. In this exploratory article, we advance our understanding of how specialized media serving marginalized communities address rights discourse by analyzing coverage of such claims in an original database of LGBTQ+ magazine coverage of court cases and legal claims between 1989 and 2008. Using computational content analysis techniques, we document the topics covered by LGBTQ+ media relating to rights discourse, as well as changes over time in the coverage of those topics. Our results indicate that there were important evolutions in the language of rights claims covered in LGBTQ+ media, and that this media privileges certain issues over others, thereby providing important directions for future research.