Intersectional identity and framing of Black Lives Matter news coverage

News coverage of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement published in the summer of 2020 framed protestors along ideological lines: conservative media emphasized violent riots and looting, whereas liberal sources highlighted solidarity and emphasized the police brutality motivating the demonstrations. This paper explores the impact of such coverage on attitudes toward the movement and race via a two-wave survey experiment that presents framed news stories to a sample of 894 Americans. Exposure to liberal framing increases favorability ratings significantly compared to conservative framing among all subjects. While we find no main effects on BLM policy support or racial resentment, a heterogeneity analysis based on race, partisanship, and their intersection finds meaningful differences in framing effects on Black respondents’ racial resentment. We connect this work to prior theory about susceptibility to framing and political identity ownership and discuss the findings in the context of our contemporary political moment.