The polarized talk least about polarization: Polarization discourses in tabloids and broadsheets from UK, Germany and Sweden

This study examines how newspapers from three distinct national contexts—the UK, Germany, and Sweden—report about polarization, and how such coverage makes societal division visible and emotionally salient. Drawing on 230,000 news articles from 2014 to 2023, we use Word2Vec, Named Entity Recognition, topic modeling, and anger classification to identify and analyze journalistic metadiscourse about polarization and broader division. Across countries and outlets, references to polarization increased markedly during the decade. Sweden, the least polarized country in our comparison, showed the highest volume of polarization discourse. Tabloids generally feature higher levels of anger in broader coverage but report less often about polarization than broadsheets. These findings are consistent with a reflexive-journalism logic, whereby polarization discourse is most frequent in outlets that interpret and contextualize broader societal developments, rather than in the most polarized settings. The study highlights the need for cross-national perspectives on how media frame and write about societal division.