NorrisDavis III

I study Black entertainment media as political institutions, investigating their ideological landscape and how they create political meaning for Black people.

PhD Candidate in Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. Black in AI Safety and Ethics Research Fellow, 2026–27. On the 2026–27 job market.

I came to this question from practice. On a gubernatorial race in Alabama, I watched a campaign reach for Black voters through the channels its consultants recommended while those voters were getting their information somewhere else. At Campaign Zero, and then at Color of Change, where I tracked AI-generated misinformation aimed at Black voters in 2024, the same question kept coming back: what are Black audiences listening to, which sources actually hold influence, and is any of it moving their politics?

Political science knows a great deal about how Black Americans reason politically, through linked fate, group consciousness, and the institutions of the Black counterpublic. It knows much less about the media where that reasoning happens, and almost none of the media it studies look like what Black audiences consume. My work sits in that gap. I study outlets like The Breakfast Club and The Shade Room, where celebrity gossip, hip-hop, and relationship advice share the hour with policing, elections, and the question of what Black people are owed, and I measure what that blending does.

A lot of that work is translation: between the Black press of Ebony and Jet and its digital descendants, between computational measurement and the feel of a morning show, and between the organizers who need answers and the scholarship that can give them.

Research

Job market paper

The World’s Most Dangerous Morning Show: Political Meaning in Black Entertainment Media

The Breakfast Club reaches its audience at once as syndicated radio on roughly a hundred stations, the second most listened-to podcast among Black Americans, a YouTube channel, and, since January 2026, a Netflix series. A survey asking about political talk radio, news podcasts, or political video would count it under none of those headings. I treat it as a political institution and measure it two ways. A census of 131 appearances by 76 candidates and officeholders from 2015 to 2026 shows campaigns using it as mobilization infrastructure, with appearances more than doubling in the final month of presidential races. A validated language-model analysis of 5,518 episodes finds that about 28 percent of the show carries political meaning, in two registers: direct framing, which surges around elections and the George Floyd protests, and ambient framing, carried through celebrity and crime coverage, which holds steady for seven years. Politicians and activists pull the show into the direct register when they appear, but their episodes account for a tenth of its direct political content and under three percent of its ambient content. The show does most of its political work on ordinary days, without them.

Read the paper

Dissertation The Ideological Landscape of Black Media in the New Media Era I argue that Black entertainment media function as political institutions, with political meaning traveling in two registers. Chapters trace the blended register from the abolitionist press through Ebony and BET to digital audio, measure it in The Breakfast Club, and apply it to sexuality, where Cathy Cohen’s work predicts boundary policing should be most visible.
Book project Strange Roommates: Politics and Entertainment in Black Media The dissertation maps what Black media supply. The book asks the reception question: what the hosts, producers, and programmers reaching the largest Black audiences believe their listeners need, and whether regular listeners hear politics in segments that never call themselves political.
With Christian Hosam Civic Density: How the Supply of Civic Opportunity Shapes Political Participation Most work on civic life looks at who joins. We look at what is available: pairing county-level data on the universe of civic organizations with the 2024 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey, we find that living in a county dense with civic opportunity predicts higher turnout, with a particularly strong effect for younger voters.

Beyond the academy

This year I am a Black in AI Safety and Ethics (BASE) Research Fellow, working with Frank L. Smith III at the Cyber and Innovation Policy Institute of the U.S. Naval War College. The same computational tools that measure political framing in a podcast corpus can measure how a field frames its own risks. The project builds a corpus of AI safety writing and uses embeddings, topic modeling, and language-model classification to map how the field divides between catastrophic and present-day risk, whether the two camps engage each other, and whose voices and countries dominate.

The present-harm side of that conversation is where minority communities appear: in bias, in misuse, and in the synthetic misinformation I tracked at Color of Change. Whether that side gets heard is the same question my dissertation asks of Black media, pointed at a different field.

2026–27Research FellowBlack in AI Safety and Ethics (BASE), U.S. Naval War College
2024Senior Campaign ResearcherColor of Change. Research on election misinformation and algorithmic bias, including AI-generated content aimed at Black voters in the 2024 cycle.
2023–24Campaign AnalystCampaign Zero. Evidence-based policy recommendations on criminal justice reform.

Teaching

I’ve led discussion sections across six courses at Berkeley since 2020, from Black political thought to experimental methods. Students rate my teaching 6.35 out of 7 on average across 211 evaluations.

Introduction to American Politics

POLSCI 1 · Fall 2022, Spring 2025

6.27 / 7

The Politics of Public Policy

POLSCI 109B · Spring 2023, Summer 2026

6.14 / 7

Crime and Democracy

POLSCI 109Z · Spring 2021

5.78 / 7

Black Political Thought

POLSCI 116J · Fall 2020

6.93 / 7

Public Opinion, Voting and Participation

POLSCI 161 · Fall 2024, Fall 2025

6.59 / 7

Experiments in Political Science

POLSCI 169 · Spring 2026

6.33 / 7

Curriculum vitae

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Let’s talk.

nldavis1@berkeley.edu GitHub LinkedIn