Thread by @GoodwinMJ

What is happening to British media? A short thread on a new piece I just shared on my Substack. It's called The Great Awokening of the British media ...
mattgoodwin.substack.com/p/the-great-aw…

A few years ago, I was struck by a new study in the US which found that the number of references in the media to prejudice, discrimination, and social justice or "woke" ideology had exploded. This was especially true in the most elite newspapers but the trend was widespread

It got me thinking, what is happening in Britain? We often assume Britain is importing US-style "culture wars", etc., but is British media displaying the same obsession with identity politics, discrimination, and social justice as its American counterparts?

So, working with @DavidRozado we ran the same technique --something called "computational content analysis"-- on around 16 million articles in British media between 2000 and 2020. I wasn't expecting to find what we found ...

Before showing you let me give you some confidence in the data. What we did was gather data on key words. Look at a random selection of words below --for example "Arab Spring"-- and you can see how media coverage rises and falls as you might expect. So the method is pretty cool

What did we find when we looked at the same terms denoting prejudice, discrimination? We found exactly the same as in America. An explosion in the number of references to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, anti-semitism ...

Between 2010-2020, terms such as racism & white supremacy in UK media increased on average by 769% and 2,827% respectively, while terms such as sexism, patriarchy & misogyny increased by 169%, 336% & 237%. Transphobia, islamophobia, anti-semitism increased by 2,578%, 289% & 469%

In fact, remarkably, when we compared the data in the US and the UK we found a high degree of consistency. Despite having radically different histories, different experiences of racism, slavery, etc., the US (red) & the UK (blue) media follow each other incredibly closely

Nor is this trend just pushed on the Left or Right. It is prevalent across media, regardless of ideological leaning, though it is slightly more pronounced on the Left in likes of Guardian & Independent. Anti-Semitism, though, was more on Right (reaction to Corbyn?)

British media, like American cousin, is now increasingly using the language of "social justice" or "woke" ideology. Terms such as hate speech, gender neutral, gender pronouns, white privilege, whiteness, slavery, cultural appropriation have all increased sharply too ...

How might we explain these remarkable trends which are visible in US, Spain, & now Britain? What does it tell us about the media class? I offer possible explanations in my Substack --do subscribe-- while David and I also discuss in accompanying podcast
mattgoodwin.substack.com/p/the-great-aw…

Might be of interest to @Musa_alGharbi @mattyglesias @bungarsargon @bariweiss @JoinPersuasion @risj_oxford @BobbyDuffyKings @epkaufm @JonHaidt