How the Media Uses the Phrase “Identity Politics”

Abstract

The phrase “identity politics” has experienced a recent surge in political discourse. However, its meaning varies for highly informed political groups, leaving the term definitionally vague for the general public. Second-level agenda-setting theory can be used to explain how this phrase is communicated to the public by the mass media, a crucial disseminator of political information. We used a quantitative content analysis of major US publications to examine the frequency of this phrase’s use and how it is presented to audiences. We found a surge in mentions beginning in 2016. We also found that it is tied more to the political Left, but there also is a fair amount of linkage to the political Right. The phrase also is portrayed negatively. We advocate for using political communication theories to track emerging political terms in the future.

Lexical and Stylistic Derivation in Mass Media Discourse

“…A thorough description of recent publications concerning the media discourse is presented in the work by Korytnik & Baranova (2020). The media discourse is regarded from different aspects: its content, specific features, and types are investigated (Kucherenko, 2019;Miroshnychenko, 2020); its classification aspects and correlations with other discourses are described; the mechanisms of its influence on the audience are revealed (Korol & Voloshchuk, 2020;de Leeuw, Azrout, Rekker, & Van Spanje, 2020;Kenzhekanova, Zhanabekova, & Konyrbekova, 2015;Amira, & Abraham, 2022). The abovementioned works demonstrate that the mass media discourse is a versatile phenomenon for research.…”