That’s what we found in our recently published scholarly paper, which explored how—and how frequently—the media covered things like racism, prejudice and discrimination between 1970 and 2019. Analyzing 27 million articles from 47 of the most popular news media outlets in the United States, we identified a recent major spike in the use of terms related to most forms of prejudice and discrimination.

The increasing use of words like racism, sexism, islamophobia, or transphobia, which you can see in the graph below, was not limited to left-leaning outlets. It was pervasive across the political spectrum—in right-aligned outlets just as much as on the left. Centrist outlets did not spend as many words on prejudice and discrimination relative to their partisan peers, but their rate of increase in these words between 2010 and 2019 was similar to left and right-leaning news outlets.

But though the spike happened recently, it did not happen as recently as you might think.