The Media Portrayals of Minorities Project was launched in 2012 at Middlebury College. We use digital sources to track and explain how and why media representations of groups shift over time, vary across place, or compare to one another. We use a mix of computer-assisted and human coding techniques that allow us to analyze large quantities of media data. Our approach provides a new way of understanding how the media establish, reproduce, and influence the portrayals of marginalized groups in media.

Who we are

Erik Bleich

Erik Bleich is the director of the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project. He is Charles A. Dana Professor of political science at Middlebury College. Bleich publishes widely on race and ethnicity in liberal democracies. He is the author, with A. Maurits van der Veen, of the award-winning book Covering Muslims: American Newspapers in Comparative Perspective, and is the co-editor of Migrants, Minorities and the Media: Information, Representations and Participation in the Public Sphere. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Al Jazeera English, Asahi Shimbun, The Conversation, Financial Times, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Prospect Magazine, and The Washington Post. He has been an invited guest on NPR’s Here and Now, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show, France 24, Danish Public Radio, CBC Radio’s Day 6, and BBC World Service’s The Inquiry.

A. Maurits van der Veen

A. Maurits van der Veen is a faculty affiliate of the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project. He is Associate Professor of Government at William & Mary, where he directs the STAIR lab. He develops text analysis procedures that we use in Media Portrayals of Minorities Project research and is a co-author on numerous research projects.

Andy Cao

Andrey (Andy) Cao, Middlebury College ’25, is a Sociology and Environmental Policy joint major from Western Massachusetts. He joined the lab in Spring 2023, and he is excited to study and engage with the role of identity politics in increasing polarization.

Eli Richardson

Eli Richardson, Middlebury College ’24, is an Environmental Economics major and Math minor from Kennebunkport, Maine. He joined the lab in Spring 2024 and is interested in media portrayals of the climate crisis and other divisive issues.

Noah Rizika

Noah Rizika, Middlebury College ’24, is a Biochemistry major from Los Angeles, California. He joined the lab in Spring 2024 and is interested in studying media portrayals of different crises and contributing to the Python scripts that make our data analysis possible.

Abby Ward

Abby Ward, Middlebury College ’25, is a Political Science Major from New York. She joined the lab in Spring 2023 and is interested in data visualization and studying the evolution of the culture wars, specifically relating to education.