Media visibility and social tolerance: Evidence from USA

Abstract

I study the impact of media visibility of people of colour on the rate of hate crimes motivated by race or ethnicity in the United States. To do so, I construct a novel measure of state-level media visibility of people of colour between 2007 and 2013. Comparing state-level variation in the hate crime rate with a measure of the one-year lagged state-level variation in media visibility, I find that an increase in media visibility reduces the number of hate crimes. The effect is not larger in states that used to be pro-slavery, but larger in states that are more prone to spontaneous emotional outbursts of hate. The result, which is robust to several checks, is in the line with the argument that "visibility matters."