Abstract
In a globalising world, foreign places and events cease being remote and irrelevant and, in this sense, ‘move closer’ to home. National news media play an important role in this process. This paper is a case study of how national print media frame international actors and the interactions between them. More specifically, the paper investigates how the media discourses of two Australasian countries (Australia and New Zealand) frame interactions between two leading world powers — the United States and the European Union. Though the official positions of Australia and New Zealand towards the EU and the USA are almost diametrically opposed, news producers in both countries employ similar creative and ‘sticky’ imagery of EU‐US interactions. This paper illustrates how the integration of this imagery results in a complex framing of EU‐US relations by the third party (Australasian print media) in terms of a blended concept, “Frenemies”. Arguably, while constructing the meaning of complex political concepts, news media discourses trigger the blending mechanism ofbackstage cognition. The presented paper studied this mechanism within the framework of conceptual integration theory developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.
Published Version
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