Subtitles that discriminate against certain English speakers?

One guest on a recent radio programme seemed to think that's what's happening. I recently rediscovered the excellent Radio 4 programme, Word of Mouth (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qtnz – definitely worth a listen for anyone interested in language).

This particular item was looking at whether the use of subtitles on TV programmes effectively discriminated against people with accents that originated outside the UK, the implication being that having your words subtitled was a kind of put-down. The guest who raised the issue suggested that, by contrast, people with certain UK accents (which could be just as difficult for the majority of the audience to understand) rarely had their dialogue subtitled. He even went as far as to say that, on one programme, of two people with similar accents, the one who had negative views about the UK had his words subtitled, while the one whose views were more positive did not.

Could this really be happening? The suggestion seemed to be that this was some form of unconscious discrimination rather than outright racism. Either way, though, it's surely something that should be investigated properly and proved one way or the other (and, to be fair to the guest in question, he did say that more research was needed).

Personally, I find it hard to believe that anyone would deliberately use subtitles in this way and certainly I've often seen subtitles for people with Glasgow and Newcastle accents in the past.

But it did get me thinking. If there is some kind of subconscious discrimination going on, based not just on the accent's origin, but also on the substance of what's being said, could it just be down to the way we process information? If someone says something we're not expecting to hear, or that we disagree with, do we literally find it harder to understand? Certainly (as any proofreader knows!), this seems to apply to the written word – all too often we read what we expect to be there rather than what's actually there...