Journal Article

'Cheating, no matter how you try to dress it up' : newspaper coverage of polyamory, 1994–2023

Abstract

Polyamorous relationships face considerable disadvantages in contemporary Western societies, from lack of legal recognition to pervasive prejudice and stigma. Many scholars have pointed out the role of mainstream media in reproducing this prejudice, but we still lack a general overview of the nature and evolution of newspaper coverage of polyamory. This article uses corpus linguistic techniques to identify and categorise the characteristic vocabulary of English-language coverage of polyamory in global mainstream newspapers 1994–2023. It shows that coverage tends to concentrate on issues of sexuality; on experiences of jealousy; and on negative ethical judgements. Terminology reflecting the views and principles of the polyamorous community is rare in comparison. The dataset and code are provided to facilitate verification, replication and extension of this research.

Authors

Lischinsky, Alon

Oxford Brookes departments

School of Education, Humanities and Languages
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Dates

Year of publication: 2025
Date of RADAR deposit: 2025-05-12

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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Related resources

This RADAR resource is Identical to 'Cheating, no matter how you try to dress it up' : newspaper coverage of polyamory, 1994–2023
This RADAR resource Cites [dataset] Polyamory in the News Corpus (POLYNEWS)