Mediated Belonging and Othering: Analysing the Embeddings of Dominant and Minoritised Groups in the News

Othering is a key component of the current political climate shaped by polarisation, populism, and nationalism. All these 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, or gender identity. Existing work, however, has predominantly focused on individual 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? Drawing on the stereotype content model (SCM), we analyse how the media portrayal of these groups varies in terms of their cooperation and status. Based on how groups are perceived, the SCM predicts different types of group stereotypes along the dimensions of warmth and competence. The model further theorises that these stereotypes can in turn predict different emotional reactions towards the stereotyped group. This two-dimensional perspective of stereotyping allows us to identify possible shifts in media portrayals over time. We hypothesise that while the representation of dominant groups remains more or less stable, the description of minoritised groups changes over time. In particular, we expect a more competitive description, which leads to a negative development on the warmth dimension. 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 10,000 articles from diverse media outlets (including broadsheets, tabloids, and regional media). News outlets were selected to ensure a comprehensive representation of political and cultural contexts across multiple countries and decades. Given that dominant groups are rarely mentioned alongside identity markers, we compare people mentions with minoritised group attributes to those without or with explicit dominant group markers. Word embeddings are used to approximate the SCM dimensions by taking the arithmetic mean of warmth and competence antonym pairs. This allows us to subsequently project the groups onto these dimensions and gives insight into the groups' position in the SCM quadrants. At large, our findings show a decrease 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. We find that this shift is more pronounced in the UK and US and particularly strong for ethnic groups, migrants, and Muslims. Applying the SCM typology of stereotypes to media coverage and identifying changes over time is particularly interesting since the SCM theorises different behaviours as a reaction to the respective stereotype. A group’s description of low warmth could be used to justify hostility towards this group. Thus, 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.