Mentions of Prejudice in News Media -- An International Comparison

Abstract

Previous research has identified a post-2010 sharp increase of terms used to denounce prejudice (i.e. racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, etc.) in U.S. and U.K. news media content. Here, we extend previous analysis to an international sample of news media organizations. Thus, we quantify the prevalence of prejudice-denouncing terms and social justice associated terminology (diversity, inclusion, equality, etc.) in over 98 million news and opinion articles across 124 popular news media outlets from 36 countries representing 6 different world regions: English-speaking West, continental Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Persian Gulf region and Asia. We find that the post-2010 increasing prominence in news media of the studied terminology is not circumscribed to the U.S. and the U.K. but rather appears to be a mostly global phenomenon starting in the first half of the 2010s decade in pioneering countries yet largely prevalent around the globe post-2015. However, different world regions' news media emphasize distinct types of prejudice with varying degrees of intensity. We find no evidence of U.S. news media having been first in the world in increasing the frequency of prejudice coverage in their content. The large degree of temporal synchronicity with which the studied set of terms increased in news media across a vast majority of countries raises important questions about the root causes driving this phenomenon.