The Media in Canada Has Gone ‘Woke’ Since 2010, Report Says

Social justice and woke language have infiltrated Canadian news outlets, suggest researchers from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute

Stacks of newspapers are stuffed into a door handle of a closed building in Toronto on April 1, 2020. (Cole Burston/Getty Images)

Terms typically associated with “social justice,” such as those relating to “gender identity prejudice,” “racism,” and “transphobia,” have skyrocketed in the mainstream news media since 2010, according to a new research paper.

Terms relating to the category of “gender identity prejudice” experienced the “starkest increase in prominence between 2010 and 2021,” a “staggering” 2,285 percent increase, according to the report. The term “white supremacy” increased by 8,001 percent between 2010 and 2021.

The report, “Northern Awokening: How social justice and woke language have infiltrated Canadian news media,” was released on March 8 by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a national, nonpartisan public policy think tank.

The report suggested the public’s criticism of news media has increased, with most surveys showing that the media is suffering from declining public trust. The report said the reasons for the decline in trust are “hotly contested,” but made no mention of how COVID-19 may have impacted public perception of the media.

Researchers analyzed more than 6 million news and opinion articles from 14 of the most popular media outlets in the country, nine published in English and five in French, and plotted the average frequency that Canadian news media used specific terms to describe types of prejudice. To carry out the analysis, researchers divided “the number of yearly occurrences of the target term in all sample articles from the outlet by the total number of all words in all sample articles from the outlet in that year,” also known as a “min-max” scaling technique.

‘Social Justice Terminology’

The report also considered the differences in how often terms were used in American, compared to Canadian, news outlets.

Based on this analysis, researchers suggest that Canadian news media pioneered “the increasing use of social justice terminology” with woke words such as “racism,” “sexism,” “islamophobia,” “homophobia,” “gender discrimination,” “white supremacy,” “xenophobia,” “transphobia,” “unconscious bias,” “white privilege,” “cultural appropriation,” and “misogyny,” “activism,” and “diversity.”

A graphic with the report also lists terms such as: “safe space,” “gender pronouns,” “hate speech,” “colonialism,” and “inclusive.”

According to the researchers, terms related to perceived prejudice surrounding sexual orientation have decreased in prevalence. References to “anti-Semitism” seem to be on the decline in Canada, but were on the rise in usage by American news media in the last decade.

References to “islamophobia” were historically three times more prominent in Canadian news media than in U.S. counterparts, but seem to have peaked prior to 2021. The researchers suggest the term has declined slightly further in media usage over the last few years.

Terms that “signify distinct forms of prejudice” have risen in American news media since 2010, according to the report. As one example, within just 10 years in the New York Times, the term “racist” rose by 638 percent, while “sexist” rose by 403 percent, and “homophobic” rose by 402 percent.

Regardless of ideological leanings, similar dramatic increases were present in other American news media, as well as British and Spanish news media, according to the report.

Political Leanings of Journalists

The paper presented six possible reasons to explain the “post-2010 explosion in the Canadian news media’s use of terms relating to prejudice.”

One of the possible factors the researchers put forth is “an increasing ideological skew among news media professionals,” noting that reporters have become “increasingly and disproportionately left-leaning.”

For example, one 2021 study considered the bias of journalists in 17 Western countries. “In all the studied countries with the exception of Slovenia, the average journalist from each country displayed a clear skew to the left in comparison with the country’s average voter,” said the report.

It also references 2021 research from the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, indicating that 53 percent of British journalists identified themselves as being left of the political centre, while only 23 percent identified themselves as being to the right.

“Critically, this disparity is even more acute among young journalists, among which 56 percent self-identified as left-of-center and just 18 percent as right-of-centre. A similar study from the United States quantified that in the year 2013, only 7 percent of American journalists self-identified as conservative,” said the report.

Agenda

The paper also suggests there may be financial incentives for news media “to use highly emotional language in order to maximize digital ‘click-throughs.’”

“The potential role of news media in driving public opinion through its ‘agenda setting’ effect is another possibility that cannot be discounted,” said the researchers, noting that there were more news stories about terrorism and crime just before the public becomes preoccupied with those topics, regardless of the actual levels of crime or terrorism.

The report suggests one hypothesis could be media coverage is reflecting a potential increase in societal prejudice in recent years, or that there could be increasing “public and institutional sensitivity to prejudice.”

The researchers conclude their analysis by finding that “social justice discourse” language has increased in Canada since 2010.

“Other authors have previously referred to this—the increased prominence of prejudice mentions in news media content and related changes in public perceptions about prejudice severity in society—as the “Great Awokening,” said the report.

“Perhaps the main question arising from this report is whether the Canadian news media’s increasing focus on the topic of prejudice reflects an uptick in prejudicial attitudes in Canadian society between 2010 and 2020, or if, instead, news media content does not reflect social attitudes but instead primes them,” the report concludes.