Mediated Belonging and Othering of Dominant and Minoritised Groups in the News

Othering is a key component of the current political climate shaped by populist backlashes and authoritarianism. Typical othering narratives by right-wing populist actors are us-vs-them discourses, which are exacerbated by various ongoing crises that challenge states as to who they are responsible for and who belongs. Through othering illiberal forces contribute to a weakening of democracy and its core values like civic tolerance. Importantly, othering today affects multiple outgroups that differ from dominant groups based on their nationality, religion, sexual orientation, and/or gender identity. Existing work, however, has predominantly focused on the othering and misrepresentation of individual minoristised groups. A comparative perspective, including (a) between-group comparisons, (b) the inclusion of dominant groups, (c) a cross-national as well as (c) longitudinal perspective are missing. The research question addressed by this study is: How similar (or different) are the media portrayals of dominant and minoritised groups? Based on the observations from social identity theory that intergroup comparisons are essential for identity formation, this study will focus on stereotyping, one consequence of the group biases that result from these comparisons. Drawing on the stereotype content model (SCM), we thus analyse how the media portrayal of dominant and minoritised groups varies in terms of their competitiveness and status. Based on how groups are perceived, the SCM predicts different types of group stereotypes along the dimensions of warmth and competence. This allows us to compare the extend and type of stereotyping between countries and identify possible shifts in media portrayals over time. We expect that minoritised groups, like refugees or Muslims, will be represented with less warmth and competence in the news. We also hypothesise that while the representation of dominant groups, such as citizens, remains more or less stable, the description of minoritised groups fluctuates more over time. The empirical analysis is based on a novel corpus of news coverage spanning 20 years from Germany, Poland, the UK, and the US. The corpus includes more than 100,000 articles from diverse media outlets (including broadsheets, tabloids, and regional media). Based on observations that the characteristics of dominant group members are taken for granted, we compare people mentions with minoritised group attributes to those without or with explicit dominant group markers. To leverage high-resource language technologies, we translated the German and Polish sentences into English. A sentence embedding model is then used to analyse these sentences with respect to their competence and warmth. T-tests were conducted to determine the significance in differences between the dominant and minoritised groups. The results are further aggregated and compared longitudinally and across countries. At large, our findings show more fluctuations in warmth and competence for minoritized groups, while news coverage of dominant groups remains stable. Having said that, there are important nuances between minoritised groups, news outlets and countries. By moving beyond the focus on the tone of media coverage of past research, this study sheds light on the media’s role in social cohesion by providing important and nuanced insights into the media portrayal of dominant and minoritised groups.