The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Lucas Paulo da Silva, who reminds us that media outlets tend to chase large audiences. But can they do this across two ideological dimensions: economic and cultural? This might include left conservatives or right progressives, for instance.
Politically invested media actors tend to have very strongly correlated positions across issues, and so do party systems; if outlets are responsible to both economic and cultural dimensions, then this might make them less correlated over time, and this might also happen dynamically in response to exogenous developments.
This project extracted English-language news articles between 2016 and 2024 from the vast Common Crawl data repository, covering some 8,800 outlets; it used various LLMs to classify them to determine whether they cover economic, cultural, or other issues, and then assessed their ideological leaning. From this, it produced outlet-level datasets with economic and cultural scores.
This can be examined over time, and shows considerable impact from major events in the English-speaking world; in most major countries covered by the data, cultural and economic positioning appears to be correlated. This correlation is increasing: cross-positional mixes are less represented in the data over time.
This is a concern for audiences: they are now likely to have to engage with outlets which do not represent their views on specific dimensions, which may lead them too to change their positioning, and thereby to become more polarised.
