The Ideological Capture of the British Media

Earlier today, Noah Carl wrote about Spain’s Great Awokening, citing the work of David Rozado who looks at the increasing frequency with which particular words and phrases appear in the mainstream media, such as ‘transphobia’ and ‘white supremacy’, indicating an embrace of woke ideology. The same researcher has now collaborated with the political scientist Matthew Goodwin to look at the British media. Unsurprisingly, the results show it has succumbed to the same intellectual virus. Here is an extract from Matthew’s Substack newsletter outlining their findings.

Over the last 20 years, between 2000 and 2020, the British media has been utterly transformed. Just like America, our media has become utterly consumed by identity politics, discrimination, and is increasingly embracing social justice ideology.

The Great Awokening, in short, is now just as visible, if not more so, here in Britain.

As you can see below, over the last twenty years media references to words such as racism, racist, white supremacy, and xenophobia increased, on average, by 511%, while words such as sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, and gender discrimination rocketed by 172%. So too have terms such as transphobic and transphobia (up 4143%), Islamophobia and Islamophobic (up 306%), and anti-semitism (up 381%).

These sharp increases are pervasive across media – regardless of whether they are on the left, the right, or the centre (though they are most pronounced in left media, such as The Independent and The Guardian). The one exception, between 2015 and 2020, is references to anti-Semitism, which were more prominent in right-leaning news outlets – most likely in response to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party.

Mentions of prejudice have also become more prominent in the BBC, the leading public service outlet. From 2010 to 2020, BBC mentions of terms suggestive of racism increased by 802% while mentions of terms suggestive of sexism increased by 610%. Mentions of homophobia and transphobia increased by 134% and 3,341% respectively while islamophobia and anti-Semitism increased by 585% and 2,431%, respectively.

Similarly, references to words or concepts that are associated with social justice or woke ideology – such as social justice, unconscious bias, white privilege, whiteness, slavery, cultural appropriation, gender pronouns, and hate speech- have also surged.

Contrary to the argument that these are simply being pushed by right-wing culture warriors we actually find the opposite – they are being mentioned across both the right and left media, and are more likely to be cited on the left than the right.

They are reflected in stories about white schoolchildren in Brighton being told by teachers they are not ‘racially innocent’, the BBC flagging ‘Non-Binary Day’, or the Guardian complaining about the ‘whiteness’ of the England women’s football squad. The language of social justice is no longer just reflected in politics, universities, or celebrity culture; it is now widespread in the media people are consuming.

Worth reading in full – and you can subscribe to Professor Goodwin’s Substack newsletter here.