Metaphor and intertextuality in media framings of the (1984–1985) British Miners’ Strike: A multimodal analysis

Abstract

The British Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985 represents one of the most pivotal periods in British industrial relations. The significance of media stance towards the miners remains a controversial issue today, as attested by recent publications looking back at the strike (Williams, 2009a, 2014). Here, authors including miners, journalists and other commentators argue that media coverage of the strike followed a consistently anti-trade union agenda in which the media sought to destabilise the strike. An internal British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) report, only recently made public, shows that the BBC themselves had concerns over possible imbalances in their coverage of the so-called ‘Battle of Orgreave’ (Harcup, 2014). Despite the weight attached to media coverage in this context, however, surprisingly little research has been conducted from a discourse-analytical perspective to show systematically and empirically how such an agenda may have been manifested across media texts. In this article, drawing on Cognitive Linguistic Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS), I show how one particular metaphorical framing of the strike, which construed the strike as a war between the State and the National Union of Miners, persisted through the year-long period and consider the potential ideological functions of this framing in media strategies of (de)legitimation. I show how this metaphor featured in linguistic, visual and multimodal forms of media representation.