Diversity of thought and the culture war: how journalistic discourse can be used as a weapon

Several corpus-based studies show that recurrent lexical patterns be explored within co-textual and contextual frameworks to reflect either a positive or a negative evaluation of the associated sociocultural groups or political positions (e.g. Baker et al., 2013; Erjavec, 2001; Zanca 2017, 2018). Other studies on fake news and on the construction of consensus (Unkelbach et al. 2019; Unkelbach & Greifeneder, 2018), equally stress the importance of repetition to create ‘fluency’, this time as part of a conscious and intentional way to influence “perceived social consensus, that is, the perception that a belief is shared by many others” (Greifeneder et al. 2021: 78). This paper is based on the comparison of the word DIVERSITY (Conversi, 2014; Kymlicka, 2016; Teubert, 2001) and other relevant lexical items in a corpus of UK newspaper articles collected during the Pandemic from March 2020 to the end of February 2021 and corpora collected in previous years. Following the MdCADS methodology (Partington, 2010; 2013; Schäffner 1996), an extensive diachronic quantitative and qualitative investigation was conducted, showing discourse features related to the idea of diversity and “the broader societal and political framework in which such discourse is embedded” (Schäffner 1996: 201) and exploring “the relationship between instance and system, between the typical and the exceptional, between signal and noise” (Partington 2004). Some results, seem to outline the propagation of new discourses, indicating an increased criticism and conflictual attitude towards the idea of diversity. The discussion will explore in particular the role that journalistic discourse about diversity takes in the emerging political ’culture war’