Framing School Integration: A Computational Analysis of Newspaper Discourse, 1990–2020.

This article analyzes how U.S. newspapers framed the issue of racial school integration from 1990 to 2020, using structural topic modeling on a dataset of over 13,000 articles from 25 newspapers. It identifies three major trends in media framing: depoliticization (a decline in coverage of political and legal aspects), historicization (an increased focus on integration as a historical phenomenon), and neoliberalization (a rise in frames linking integration to market-based school reforms such as school choice and standardized testing). These framing patterns vary by newspaper ideology, geographic location—particularly whether the outlet is in a former Jim Crow state—and whether the newspaper serves a national or regional audience. The study suggests that these media frames contribute to the public's paradoxical support for integration in principle alongside opposition to concrete integration policies, by portraying integration as a resolved historical issue and emphasizing individual choice and achievement gaps over collective political action.