Prevalence of Prejudice-Denoting Words in News Media Discourse: A Chronological Analysis

Abstract

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.

Keywords

computational social science word frequency counts communications sociology the great awokening prejudice news media

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

al-Gharbi

(2019). Resistance as sacrifice: Toward an ascetic antiracism. Sociological Forum, 34(S1), 1197–1216. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.12544

al-Gharbi

(2020, September 8). Cable news profits from its obsession with Trump. Viewers are the only victims. Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/politics/cable-news-trump-obsession.php

AllSides Media Bias Ratings. (2019). AllSides. https://www.allsides.com/blog/updated-allsides-media-bias-chart-version-11

Associated Press. (2020, July 16). Diversity of LGBTQ characters in film declines, study finds. https://www.voanews.com/arts-culture/diversity-lgbtq-characters-film-declines-study-finds

Bahr

(2021, January 14). L.G.B.T.Q. TV representation falls for first time in 5 years, Glaad finds. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/arts/television/tv-lgbtq-glaad.html

Bonilla-Silva

(2017). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Caliskan

Bryson

J. J.

Narayanan

(2017). Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases. Science, 356(6334), 183–186. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aal4230

Callanan

V. J.

(2012). Media consumption, perceptions of crime risk and fear of crime: Examining race/ethnic differences. Sociological Perspectives, 55(1), 93–115. https://doi.org/10.1525/sop.2012.55.1.93

Campbell

Manning

(2014). Microaggression and moral cultures. Comparative Sociology, 13(6), 692–726. https://doi.org/10.1163/15691330-12341332

10.

Charlesworth

T. E. S.

Banaji

M. R.

(2019). Patterns of implicit and explicit attitudes: I. Long-term change and stability from 2007 to 2016. Psychological Science, 30(2), 174–192. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618813087

11.

Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford University. (n.d.). Stanford cable TV news analyzer. Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer. Retrieved September 2, 2020, from https://tvnews.stanford.edu/

12.

Cooke

(2005). A visual convergence of print, television, and the Internet: Charting 40 years of design change in news presentation. New Media & Society, 7(1), 22–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444805049141

13.

Crandall

C. S.

Miller

J. M.

White

M. H.

(2018). Changing norms following the 2016 U.S. presidential election: The trump effect on prejudice. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9(2), 186–192. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617750735

14.

Dawson

(2020, December 16). Presence vs. representation: Report breaks down LGBTQ visibility on TV. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/presence-vs-representation-report-breaks-down-lgbtq-visibility-tv-n1251153

15.

Dickey

D. A.

Fuller

W. A.

(1979). Distribution of the estimators for autoregressive time series with a unit root. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 74(366), 427–431. https://doi.org/10.2307/2286348

16.

Fassin

Rechtman

(2009). The empire of trauma: An inquiry into the condition of victimhood ( Gomme

, Trans.; 1st ed.). Princeton University Press.

17.

Gallup. (2020, June 1). U.S. support for same-sex marriage matches record high. Gallup.Com. https://news.gallup.com/poll/311672/support-sex-marriage-matches-record-high.aspx

18.

Gallup. (2021, February 24). LGBT identification rises to 5.6% in latest U.S. estimate. Gallup.Com. https://news.gallup.com/poll/329708/lgbt-identification-rises-latest-estimate.aspx

19.

Gao

(2015, June 29). Most Americans now say learning their child is gay wouldn’t upset them. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/29/most-americans-now-say-learning-their-child-is-gay-wouldnt-upset-them/

20.

Granger

C. W. J.

(1969). Investigating causal relations by econometric models and cross-spectral methods. Econometrica, 37(3), 424–438. https://doi.org/10.2307/1912791

21.

Haslam

(2016). Concept creep: Psychology’s expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418

22.

Hong

Crichton

Zhang

D. Y.

Ritchie

Barenholtz

Hannel

Yao

Murray

Moriba

Agrawala

Fatahalian

(2020). Analyzing who and what appears in a decade of US cable TV news. ArXiv:2008.06007 [Cs] . http://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06007

23.

Hopkins

D. J.

Washington

(2020). The rise of trump, the fall of prejudice? Tracking white Americans’ racial attitudes via a panel survey, 2008–2018. Public Opinion Quarterly, 84(1), 119–140. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfaa004

24.

Huang

J. S.

Heider

(2007). Media convergence: A case study of a cable news station. International Journal on Media Management, 9(3), 105–115. https://doi.org/10.1080/14241270701521717

25.

Johnson

(2011). Muslims in the United States. Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/muslims-united-states

26.

Kawamoto

(2003). Digital journalism: Emerging media and the changing horizons of journalism. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

27.

Klinenberg

(2005). Convergence: News production in a digital age. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 597(1), 48–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716204270346

28.

Kozlowski

A. C.

Taddy

Evans

J. A.

(2019). The geometry of culture: Analyzing the meanings of class through word embeddings. American Sociological Review, 84(5), 905–949. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419877135

29.

Krysan

Moberg

(2016, August 25). Trends in racial attitudes. University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs. https://igpa.uillinois.edu/programs/racial-attitudes#section-5

30.

Kwiatkowski

Phillips

Schmidt

Shin

(1992). Testing the null hypothesis of stationarity against the alternative of a unit root: How sure are we that economic time series have a unit root? Journal of Econometrics, 54(1–3), 159–178.

31.

Leong

(2021). Identity capitalists: The powerful insiders who exploit diversity to maintain inequality (1st ed.). Stanford University Press.

32.

Levari

D. E.

Gilbert

D. T.

Wilson

T. D.

Sievers

Amodio

D. M.

Wheatley

(2018). Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgment. Science, 360(6396), 1465–1467. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap8731

33.

Lowry

D. T.

Nio

T. C. J.

Leitner

D. W.

(2003). Setting the public fear agenda: A longitudinal analysis of network TV crime reporting, public perceptions of crime, and FBI crime statistics. Journal of Communication, 53(1), 61–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2003.tb03005.x

34.

Lukianoff

Haidt

(2018). The coddling of the American mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure (Illustrated ed.). Penguin Press.

35.

Mallett

R. K.

Monteith

M. J.

(2019). Confronting prejudice and discrimination: The science of changing minds and behaviors. Academic Press.

36.

MAP. (2020). Movement advancement project | 2020 Tally report. https://www.lgbtmap.org/2020-tally-report

37.

Marsden

P. V.

Smith

T. W.

Hout

(2020). Tracking US social change over a half-century: The general social survey at fifty. Annual Review of Sociology, 46(1), 109–134. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-121919-054838

38.

McCombs

(2005). A look at agenda-setting: Past, present and future. Journalism Studies, 6(4), 543–557. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616700500250438

39.

McCombs

Valenzuela

(2021). Setting the agenda: Mass media and public opinion (3rd ed.). Polity.

40.

Meagher

K. D.

Shu

(2019). Trends in U.S. gender attitudes, 1977 to 2018: Gender and educational disparities. Socius, 5. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023119851692

41.

Mehmood

M. A.

Shafiq

H. M.

Waheed

(2017). Understanding regional context of World Wide Web using common crawl corpus. In 2017 IEEE 13th Malaysia international conference on communications (MICC) (pp. 164–169). https://doi.org/10.1109/MICC.2017.8311752

42.

Moberg

S. P.

Krysan

Christianson

(2019). Racial attitudes in America. Public Opinion Quarterly, 83(2), 450–471. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfz014

43.

Notess

G. R.

(2002). The wayback machine: The web’s archive. Online, 26(2). https://www.elibrary.ru/item.asp?id=4370136

44.

Pew Research Center. (2018, October 22). Democrats increasingly view racism and sexism as very big national problems; larger shares in both parties say drug addiction is a major problem. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/22/more-in-u-s-see-drug-addiction-college-affordability-and-sexism-as-very-big-national-problems/ft_18-10-22_nationalproblems_democrats-views-racism-sexism/

45.

Pew Research Center, 1615 L. St. (2017, August 29). More now see racism as major problem, especially democrats. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/29/views-of-racism-as-a-major-problem-increase-sharply-especially-among-democrats/

46.

Quinton

W. J.

(2019). Unwelcome on campus? Predictors of prejudice against international students. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 12(2), 156–169. https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000091

47.

Racially profiling “jihadists” sounds like common sense: Here’s why it doesn’t work. (2016, September 21). Musa Al-Gharbi. https://musaalgharbi.com/2016/09/21/profiling-commonsense-badidea/

48.

Rozado

(2019). Using word embeddings to analyze how universities conceptualize “diversity” in their online institutional presence. Society, 56(3), 256–266. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-019-00362-9

49.

Rozado

(2020a). Prejudice and victimization themes in New York Times discourse: A chronological analysis. Academic Questions, 33(1), 89–100. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12129-019-09857-7

50.

Rozado

(2020b). Wide range screening of algorithmic bias in word embedding models using large sentiment lexicons reveals underreported bias types. PLoS One, 15(4), e0231189. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231189

51.

Savage

(writer and activist). (2011). 2011: An extraordinary year for gay rights. NPR.Org. https://www.npr.org/2011/12/31/144520538/2011-an-extraordinary-year-for-gay-rights

52.

Singer

J. B.

(2004). Strange bedfellows? The diffusion of convergence in four news organizations. Journalism Studies, 5(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670032000174701

53.

Singer

J. B.

(2009). Convergence and divergence. Journalism, 10(3), 375–377. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884909102579

54.

Smith

B. K.

Stohl

al-Gharbi

(2019). Discourses on countering violent extremism: The strategic interplay between fear and security after 9/11. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 12(1), 151–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2018.1494793

55.

Stimson

J. A.

(2018). The dyad ratios algorithm for estimating latent public opinion: Estimation, testing, and comparison to other approaches. Bulletin of Sociological Methodology/Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, 137–138(1), 201–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/0759106318761614

56.

Telhami

(2002, December 1). Arab and Muslim America: A snapshot. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/arab-and-muslim-america-a-snapshot/

57.

Tosi

Warmke

(2016). Moral grandstanding. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 44(3), 197–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12075

58.

U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: District of Columbia . (2020a, April 1). https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/DC

59.

U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: New York County (Manhattan Borough), New York . (2020b, April 1). https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcountymanhattanboroughnewyork/EDU635219

60.

U.S. Department of Justice. (2011, February 23). Statement of the attorney general on litigation involving the Defense of Marriage Act. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/statement-attorney-general-litigation-involving-defense-marriage-act

61.

Zogby

(2018). Underreported, under threat: Hate crime in the United States and the targeting of Arab Americans. Decode Hate—Arab American Institute. https://www.decodehate.com/reporthate

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

3.60 MB