Published July 30, 2022 | Version v1
Report Open

The Increasing Prominence of Prejudice and Social Justice Rhetoric in UK News Media

Creators

  • 1. Otago Polytechnic
  • 2. University of Kent

Description

  • Recent years have seen considerable debate about the rise of political polarisation in British society. Specifically, over the last decade, various studies have suggested that the UK is now rapidly following the United States into a more polarised politics in which intensifying ‘culture wars’ over issues such as racism, identity, diversity, history, the legacy of history, and ‘social justice’ or so-called ‘woke’ politics are becoming far more prominent.
  • While this debate typically focuses on the role of party politics, much less attention has focused on the relationship between news media and rising polarisation. Building on recent pioneering research which has tracked a sharp increase in the overall prominence of prejudice and social justice rhetoric in US and Spanish media, our purpose in this report is to explore whether similar trends are now also visible in the UK.
  • We use computational content analysis to explore the chronological prevalence in UK news media of words which denote prejudice (i.e., sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.) and ‘social justice’ or ‘woke’ rhetoric (i.e., white privilege, whiteness, cultural appropriation, diversity, etc.). Our main interest in doing so is to explore how the media debate has changed over time.
  • Thus, we present analyses of UK media usage of these terms between the years 2000 and 2020 in 16 million news and opinion articles, published in a nationally representative sample of ten popular British media outlets: The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Mirror, BBC, The Times, Financial Times, Metro, The Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Sun. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive analysis of UK media coverage of these issues to date.
  • Consistent with recent studies in the U.S. and Spain, we find that references to prejudice and social justice rhetoric have increased sharply in UK media in recent years. Between 2010 and 2020, terms such as racism and white supremacy in popular UK media outlets increased on average by 769% and 2,827% respectively, while terms such as sexism, patriarchy and misogyny increased by 169%, 336% and 237% each. Additional terms such as transphobia, islamophobia and anti-semitism increased by 2,578%, 289% and 469% respectively. Similarly, terms associated with social justice discourse have also markedly increased over the same temporal period: diversity (199%), activism (146%), hate speech (880%), inequality (218%), gender-neutral (1,019%) or slavery (413%).
  • These sharp increases are pervasive across media, regardless of their ideological leanings. But overall prevalence tends to be larger in left-leaning outlets. Mentions of prejudice have also become far more prominent in the BBC, the UK’s leading public service outlet. From 2010 to 2020, mentions in BBC content of terms suggestive of racism have increased by over 802% while mentions of terms suggestive of sexism have increased by 610%. Mentions of homophobia and transphobia increased by 134% and 3,341% respectively. Terms signifying islamophobia and anti-Semitism increased by 585% and 2,431%.
  • By tracking the temporal prevalence of terms denoting prejudice and social justice in UK news media, we throw light on how the UK media debate is evolving and raise important questions about whether media institutions have got the balance right in how we talk about these issues. In the final section, we consider possible explanations for the sharp increase in the prominence of prejudice and social justice rhetoric in UK news media, including the shifting profile of the UK media class which has increasingly become far more elite.

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