From 'politically correct councillors' to 'Blairite nonsense': discourses of 'political correctness' in three British newspapers.

This article explores discourses of 'political correctness' ('PC') in a corpus of articles gathered from three broadsheet newspapers in the UK between 1994 and 1999. Using the software package WordSmith Tools (Scott, 1999) two types of analysis were undertaken: first, a numerical count of so-called 'PC-related terms ('political correctness', 'politically correct', etc.) in each of the three newspapers; and second, a compilation of the 'keywords' which occurred most frequently within the corpus in relation to the term 'political correctness'. Our study reveals an overall decline in the use of 'PC'-related terms throughout the period in question, but suggests some interesting shifts in the way in which discourses of 'political correctness' have been drawn upon as a means of framing debates over the British Labour Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]