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José Duarte's avatar

Nice work, David. I think you'll find much starker effects looking at "systemic racism" than just racism. That construct or abstraction is substantively essential to the new leftist ideology that swept our institutions and media in the last few years. Basically, the ideology of the academic left replaced mainstream leftist, née "liberal", ideology. Also, "structural racism/oppression", though I think systemic is more common. This is core to CRT, critical theory generally, Marxism, etc.

Another suggestion to get at bias is to look for whether terms are quoted or not. For example, you'll find newspaper articles in the 1990s, maybe later, where systemic racism is wrapped in quotes, which it should be since it's a proprietary leftist construct that is fully contested in terms of existing or describing reality re: black or brown people in the US in 2023 (I think conservatives, libertarians, and some leftists would find use for the term to describe discrimination against Asians in college admissions, possibly white kids as well).

Media that use ideological constructs as *descriptive* are profoundly biased and unprofessional. It's the difference between referring to systemic racism just taking for granted that it's real, much less the cause of some outcome (as asserted in leftist ideology), as opposed to quoting it and saying that these people claim "systemic racism" is the cause of XYZ.

You'll also find outlets like the NYT wrapping transgender in quotes in 1995, probably later as well. It's a new, synthetic ideological construct, so that's appropriate. So tracking media wrapping leftist ideological constructs in quotes, and then no longer doing that, would be an interesting way to trace their radicalization.

And using fake clinical-sounding pathology terms like transphobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, etc. to label a human being merits special attention and condemnation, especially if it's just for mundane disagreement or non-compliance with leftist ideology (like noting that there are two sexes, or opposing men crashing women's sports). All these outlets that do it should be excoriated, and we need to build online tools and databases that document it, and hold them to account. So use of x-phobic specifically might be worth teasing apart from x-phobia, especially if you can determine that it's been applied as a label for a specific person. These terms aren't actually "prejudice types" as far as anyone knows – they're non-existent, fake clinical-sounding pathology terms created by political ideologues to smear dissenters. So their use in media isn't like racism, and is inherently biased – in my view it should be called out specially.

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William Lane's avatar

To me this is part of a broader trend of global *aesthetic* convergence (see here for an exploration https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average).

The way journalists write about issues, and which issues they choose to report on, is being influenced by the Western, and especially American, zeitgeist. I suspect this is not due to any objective, global uptick in actual prejudice nor any structural dynamics that might be present in each of the counties mentioned.

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