Dataset for Report: "The Increasing Prominence of Prejudice and Social Justice Rhetoric in UK News Media"

This data set contains frequency counts of target words in 16 million news and opinion articles from 10 popular news media outlets in the United Kingdom. The target words are listed in the associated report and are mostly words that denote prejudice or are often associated with social justice discourse. A few additional words not denoting prejudice are also available since they are used in the report for illustration purposes of the method.

The textual content of news and opinion articles from the outlets is available in the outlet's online domains and/or public cache repositories such as Google cache (https://webcache.googleusercontent.com), The Internet Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/web.php), and Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org). We used derived word frequency counts from these sources. Textual content included in our analysis is circumscribed to articles headlines and main body of text of the articles and does not include other article elements such as figure captions.

Targeted textual content was located in HTML raw data using outlet specific xpath expressions. Tokens were lowercased prior to estimating frequency counts. To prevent outlets with sparse text content for a year from distorting aggregate frequency counts, we only include outlet frequency counts from years for which there is at least 1 million words of article content from an outlet. This threshold was chosen to maximize inclusion in our analysis of outlets with sparse amounts of articles text per year. 

Yearly frequency usage of a target word in an outlet in any given year was estimated by dividing the total number of occurrences of the target word in all articles of a given year by the number of all words in all articles of that year. This method of estimating frequency accounts for variable volume of total article output over time.

In a small percentage of articles, outlet specific XPath expressions might fail to properly capture the content of the article due to the heterogeneity of HTML elements and CSS styling combinations with which articles text content is arranged in outlets online domains. As a result, the total and target word counts metrics for a small subset of articles are not precise. In a random sample of articles and outlets, manual estimation of target words counts overlapped with the automatically derived counts for over 90% of the articles.

Most of the incorrect frequency counts are often minor deviations from the actual counts such as for instance counting the word "Facebook" in an article footnote encouraging article readers to follow the journalist’s Facebook profile and that the XPath expression mistakenly included as the content of the article main text.To conclude, in a data analysis of over 16 million articles, we cannot manually check the correctness of frequency counts for every single article and hundred percent accuracy at capturing articles’ content is elusive due to the small number of difficult to detect boundary cases such as incorrect HTML markup syntax in online domains. Overall however, we are confident that our frequency metrics are representative of word prevalence in print news media content (see Figure 2 of main manuscript for supporting evidence of the temporal precision of the method).