Our Research Shows the ‘Great Awokening’ Preceded Trump and Outlasted Him | Opinion

Over the last five years, poll after poll has found that the GOP base has grown warmer towards Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants and Muslims. They’ve simultaneously become more skeptical of Christian nationalism and are now significantly more accepting of same sex marriage and non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ Americans. And the rest of America has shifted even further in these directions.

And yet, this may be surprising to many. Based on how mainstream media outlets cover issues of identity and prejudice, you would be forgiven for assuming the trends have been heading the opposite way.

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.

via www.newsweek.com