Northern Awokening: Social-justice and prejudice-signifying language in Canadian news media

I have recently published a report with Aaron Wudrick from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute about changes in the language that the news media in Canada use.

I have documented previously how in American news media mentions of terms that signify distinct forms of prejudice have risen dramatically since 2010. The report linked above takes a similar analysis of Canadian news media, using data from 14 major Canadian news outlets for the period of 2000 to 2021. We find a similar rise in the prevalence of terms that signify prejudice in Canadian news media, with the exception of anti-Semitism.

The prevalence of terms denoting ethnic prejudice is fairly similar in American and Canadian news media. Canadian news seems to have lost interest on the topic of gender prejudice since its peak in 2016. Interest on the topic in American news media however remained elevated up to 2021. The prominence of terms that signify prejudice against Islamic religious faith, sexual orientation and gender identity has been historically larger in Canadian news media in comparison to their American counterparts. In recent years, however, American news media has emphasized terms denoting gender prejudice, antisemitism, sexual orientation prejudice, and gender identity prejudice more than Canadian news media. The temporal dynamics with which news media from both countries use prejudice signifying terms is highly correlated for most prejudice types. Terms referring to sexual orientation prejudice and anti-semitism display the lesser degree of coupling between news media from both countries. Interestingly, terms about sexual orientation and gender identity prejudice started to increase earlier in Canadian news media that in American news media.

We also compared the prominence of several terms often associated with social justice discourse between American and Canadian news media. There is considerable variation in the prevalence of individual terms, dynamics however, with some terms being substantially more prevalent in American news media, particularly in recent years (social justice, inequality, bias, whiteness, slavery, activism, gender pronouns, or hate speech) and others being slightly more prominent in Canadian news media (equality, fairness, discrimination, colonialism, safe space, or cultural appropriation). There is a common uptick in recent years in the usage of many of these terms by American news media which is not as apparent or as marked in Canadian news media.

More analysis and discussion about these trends in the published report.