Our recent research shows that when it comes to calling out political extremism, media figures are much more likely to decry political extremism from the right than from the left. We have the data to prove it.
In our study, we conducted data analysis of millions of news and opinion articles from popular U.S. and U.K. news media outlets and quantified the media’s use of extreme qualifiers such as “ultra,” “extreme,” or “far” when speaking about right and left political orientation. That is, we counted the number of times different news outlets mentioned terms such as “far-right,” “far-left,” “radical right,” “radical left,” “right-wing extremism,” “left-wing extremism,” etc. Overall, we found that most mainstream news-media outlets mention the far right much more often than the far left. …
While it is indisputable that groups labeled “far right” have been increasingly prominent in U.S. and European politics, it is also plausible that the center of gravity in established media newsrooms, as in other professions of cultural influence, has been shifting leftwards, especially as prestige news-media companies are increasingly organized and edited by graduates from elite universities, who tend to hold socially liberal beliefs that might shape their choice of political adjectives.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member