The Polarizers don’t talk about Polarization: Polarization discourses in tabloids and broadsheets from UK, Germany and Sweden

This study examines how different types of newspapers in three distinct national contexts—the UK, Germany, and Sweden—report about polarization, and whether such coverage may in itself contribute to fuel further polarization. Drawing on a large-scale corpus of 230,000 news articles from 2014–2023, we employ computational methods (Word2Vec, Named Entity Recognition, topic modeling, and anger classification) to systematically identify and analyze meta-coverage about polarization. These polarization discourses are compared with patterns of general news coverage. Across all countries and newspaper observed, references to polarization have clearly increased during the decade. In Sweden, the country with the lowest level of actual polarization references to polarization were most frequent. Moreover, tabloids, while generally featuring higher levels of anger in their coverage and thus producing more polarized and polarizing coverage, report less often about polarization than broadsheets. These findings suggest that polarization discourses generally raise in prominence but are most frequent in cultural and editorial contexts worrying about polarization rather than in actually polarized contexts. This underscores the need for nuanced, cross-national perspectives that investigate how media frame and write when discussing potentially polarized issues.