Suchergebnisse

Previous scholarly literature has documented a pronounced increase in the prevalence of prejudice-denoting terms in American news media content. Some have referred to this shift in journalistic discourse and related public opinion trends signaling increasing perceptions of prejudice severity in U.S. society as The Great Awokening. This work analyzes whether the increasing prevalence of prejudice themes in American news media outlets has been replicated in the news media ecosystem of a Spanish-speaking country. Thus, we computationally analyzed the prevalence of words denoting prejudice in five million news and opinion articles written between 1976 and 2019 and published in three of the most widely read newspapers in Spain: El País, El Mundo and ABC. We report that within the studied time period, the frequency of terms that denote specific prejudice types related to gender, ethnicity, sexuality and religious orientation has also substantially increased across the analyzed Spanish news media outlets. There are, however, some notable distinctions in the long-term usage dynamics of prejudice-denoting terms between the leading Spanish newspaper of record, El País, and its U.S. counterpart, The New York Times.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been one of the most disruptive and painful phenomena of the last few decades. As of July 2021, the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the outbreak remain a mystery. This work analyzes the prevalence in news media articles of two popular hypotheses about SARS-CoV-2 virus origins: the natural emergence and the lab-leak hypotheses. Our results show that for most of 2020, the natural emergence hypothesis was favored in news media content while the lab-leak hypothesis was largely absent. However, something changed around May 2021 that caused the prevalence of the lab-leak hypothesis to substantially increase in news media discourse. This shift has not been uniformed across media organizations but instead has manifested itself more acutely in some outlets than others. Our structural break analysis of daily news media usage of terms related to the laboratory escape hypothesis provides hints about potential sources for this sudden shift in the prevalence of the lab-leak hypothesis in prestigious news media.

The term political extremism is commonly used to refer to political attitudes considered to be outside the ideological mainstream. This study leverages computational content analysis of big data to longitudinally examine (1970–2019) the prevalence of terms denoting far-right and far-left political extremism in more than 30 million written news and opinion articles from 54 news media outlets popular in the United States and the United Kingdom. We find that the usage of terms denoting right and left political extremism has been increasing across news media outlets in both countries. This trend is particularly stark for far-right-denoting terms, which have been growing in prevalence since at least 2008. Most U.S. and U.K. news media outlets tend to use far-right-denoting terms substantially more often than they use far-left-denoting terms. The rising prevalence in news media of terms denoting political extremism is strongly correlated with similar growing usage of terms denoting prejudice and social justice discourse.

This work analyzes 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. Our results show that the frequency of words that denote specific prejudice types related to ethnicity, gender, sexual, and religious orientation has markedly increased within the 2010–2019 decade across most news media outlets. This phenomenon starts prior to, but appears to accelerate after, 2015. The frequency of prejudice-denoting words in news articles is not synchronous across all outlets, with the yearly prevalence of such words in some influential news media outlets being predictive of those words' usage frequency in other outlets the following year. Increasing prevalence of prejudice-denoting words in news media discourse is often substantially correlated with U.S. public opinion survey data on growing perceptions of minorities' mistreatment. Granger tests suggest that the prevalence of prejudice-denoting terms in news outlets might be predictive of shifts in public perceptions of prejudice severity in society for some, but not all, types of prejudice.

Few topics are currently as polarizing as the appropriate limits, and perceived dangers, of free speech on university campuses. A side effect of this polarized environment is that students themselves may be reluctant to speak publicly on politically sensitive topics. Indeed, recent surveys by the Heterodox Academy (HxA) revealed that a majority of American university students thought their campus was not conducive to the free expression of ideas, and a substantial minority were personally reluctant to discuss "hot topics" like politics or sexual orientation in class. To see whether these results are uniquely American phenomena, we reran the HxA's survey on 791 students, recruited via advertisements, enrolled in New Zealand universities. As in the original survey, participants answered questions, administered online, about their comfort sharing their opinions on issues related to gender, politics, religion, and sexual orientation, as well as their estimates of other groups' discomfort. Despite significant sociopolitical differences between the two countries, our results, generally speaking, bear out those in the United States. In both countries, politics elicited the most reluctance to speak, followed by religion, and then gender and sexual orientation (which were equivalent), and New Zealanders were more reluctant than Americans to speak on the latter two topics. Other similarities and differences between the two data sets are discussed, but it is clear that chilled campus speech is not confined to the United States.