The mainstream media is focusing Americans on topics which are minuscule in context and declining in impact.

Excellent research.  From Prevalence of Prejudice-Denoting Words in News Media Discourse by David Rozado.  Here is the opening description of the research.  

I recently published an article with Musa Al-Gharbi and Jamin Halberstadt where we analyzed the prevalence of words denoting prejudice in 27 million news and opinion articles written between 1970 and 2019 and published in 47 of the most popular news media outlets in the United States such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal or Fox News, see AllSides Media Bias Chart v1.1 in Figure 1.

Our analysis focused primarily on tracking the prevalence of words that describe prejudice such as racism, sexism, islamophobia, anti-Semitism and homophobia. We then examined the relationship between the usage of prejudice-denoting terms in written news media and other factors, such as news outlets’ ideological leanings or the prevalence of prejudice-signifying words in cable news. We also attempted to elucidate whether the prevalence of prejudice denoting words in news media discourse changed before or after 2015, a significant year that marked the beginning of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election campaign. Our analysis continued by investigating whether some outlets preceded others on the usage dynamics of prejudice denoting words. Finally, we examined the relationship between the prevalence of prejudice denoting words in news media discourse and public opinion perceptions about prejudice severity in the wider society.

Much detailed description follows.  The conclusion:

Our results document a marked increase in the prevalence of prejudice-denoting words in news media discourse within the 2010-2019 time frame. The trend precedes the emergence of Donald Trump in the political landscape for most of the terms analyzed but appears to accelerate after 2015.  The abrupt and dramatic changes in word frequencies suggest the existence of powerful underlying social dynamics at play.

It is noteworthy that prejudice-denoting words are markedly increasing in prevalence alongside long-term decreases in overt expression of prejudice [6]-[9] yet recent increases in the perceived prevalence of such prejudice among the general public. It is our hope that the detailed characterization of the phenomena presented here can pave the way for future studies looking in-depth at potential causal factors for the trends described herein as well as the impact of news media rhetoric on public consciousness and the social implications of growing perceptions of prejudice severity among the general population.

There seem to be three pertinent questions and this research addressed two of them.

1)  Is the mainstream media more focused on prejudices than in the past?

2)  Does the mainstream media focus affect perceptions of the general population?

3)  Does the increased mainstream media focus on prejudices reflect an actual increase in objective measures of expressed or perpetrated prejudice?

This research answers the first two questions. 

1) Yes, the mainstream media is dramatically more focused on prejudices than they were ten years ago.  The mainstream media has increased their focus on prejudices by 3-6 times, depending on the particular prejudice, in just ten years.  

2)  Yes, "the correlation between prevalence of prejudice denoting words in news media and public perceptions of prejudice severity is very high" and changes in mainstream media focus are predictive of changes in public perception.

Which leaves the last question.  If there is an increase in expressed or perpetrated acts of prejudice, one would expect there to be an increase in mainstream media discussion of prejudice.  That is difficult to answer empirically because it depends on distinguishing between subjective perceptions of prejudice and actual empirical manifestations of prejudice.

You would think that that might be captured through FBI Hate Crime Statistics.  However, that reporting is highly incomplete, not particularly rigorous, prone to selective reporting errors, and subject to interpretation (do differing opinions reflect prejudices?)  But that is the best data we have for all its flaws.  

There are only two strong conclusions that one can draw from the existing reporting.  The first is that hate crimes are very rare.  Taking 2020 as indicative, there were 8,263 hate crimes across all categories (race, religion, sex/orientation, disability, etc.  This is in the context of a total of 8,879,728 criminal offenses committed in 2020.  Prejudicial crimes are 0.01% of all crimes committed.

The second conclusion one can draw from the existing reporting is that prejudicial crime is down over the past twenty-seven years.  In 1995, there were 7,947 hate crimes across all categories.  Since the population has increased by 25% since 1995, the incident rate has declined by 24%.

Another source of prejudice information is from the World Values Survey.  In the early 1980s, 9% of American respondents indicated that they would be concerned about having a persons of a different as neighbors.  In the most recent results (2017), this had fallen to 6%, a decline of 33%.  There are similar declines for various other prejudices.

It appears that over the past thirty years or so that self-reported prejudices are down some 30% and that the closest proxy to empirical data (FBI Hate Crimes) are down some 25%.

From this we might observe

1)  Self-reported and empirically recorded prejudice is down between 25-30%.

2)  Mainstream media have increased their focus on prejudices by 2-500%.

3)  Public perception of prejudice has been driven up based on mainstream media reporting despite the actual decline in expressed prejudice.

The remaining question becomes; Why has the mainstream media increased its reporting of prejudice despite the decline in measured prejudice?

Obvious candidates would include:

Journalistic innumeracy

Susceptibility to woke ideology

Dominance of Democratic party affiliation among journalists

It is very cheap to report on a subject that has little empirical data

Other candidate causes?  

Regardless.  The research by Rozado et al provide support to the concern that the mainstream media is focusing Americans on topics which are minuscule in context and declining in impact.