British Broadsheet Newspapers Research Articles

Biochar in the British print news media: an analysis of promissory discourse and the creation of expectations about carbon removal

ABSTRACT Biochar is amongst a growing suite of approaches developed to address the climate crisis by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; yet public awareness of biochar is low. In this situation, mass-media reporting plays an important role in making an issue public and in creating expectations about its risks and benefits. In British broadsheet newspapers, a promissory, future-oriented discourse on biochar has emerged that is rhetorically configured through, for example, evaluative adjectives, verbs, hyperbole, and allusions to literary and cultural symbols that confer a sense of mystique. Biochar is promoted as an almost magical fix, based on its ability to soak up and store carbon, improve soil health, increase crops yields, and reduce pollutants. Conversely, some of the possible negative aspects of biochar are couched in the form of sarcasm and parody, while others are made invisible. This sets biochar up as a moral good that the public ought to accept, rather than opening up a public debate about its risks and benefits. Engaging in a fine-grained rhetorical analysis of the way promises about biochar are constructed expands the methodological and empirical repertoire of the sociology of expectations and, in future, can be applied to the analysis of other emerging climate change technologies, especially those relating to carbon removal.

Sociotechnical imaginaries of remote personal touch before and during COVID-19: An analysis of UK newspapers

This article considers newspapers’ role in shaping the sociotechnical imaginaries of touch, and emerging technologies that digitally mediate touch. It examines the discourses of touch and personal relationships at a distance that circulated in major British broadsheet newspapers during the 2020 outbreak of coronavirus disease-19, alongside dominant narratives of touch and remote communication in the previous 5 years. In doing so, the article demonstrates how existing discourses of touch and remote communication intensified during the pandemic, while imaginations of remote touch narrowed. The sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch matter because they illuminate the kinds of social relations touch technologies are perceived to forge, maintain or deny.

“It’s like we are not human”: discourses of humanisation and otherness in the representation of trans identity in British broadsheet newspapers

ABSTRACT This paper examines how transgender identity is represented across articles from three British national newspapers: The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph. Transgender identity has become a highly contentious issue in areas of western culture, especially Britain, and even within feminism itself, with heightened visibility leading to a backlash against the rights of trans people to protection, and even recognition, in law. However, the influence of the broadsheets, Britain’s so-called “quality” newspapers, in shaping the debate over transgender rights is under-researched. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (Michelle), I assess how the above newspapers position transgender subjects to alternatively legitimize or “other” transgender identity. Despite polarisation on issues of trans rights between newspapers, this paper finds that both “pro-trans” and “anti-trans” articles appropriate a feminist lexicon to define womanhood and gender in ways that justify their stance and foster division within wider society. I conclude that (white, cisheteronormative) feminism has become a vehicle for mainstream news media to further political agendas that can be crudely cast as either “progressive” or “conservative”.

Enthusing about green peppers: the Europeanisation of British food culture in post-war Britain, 1960-1975

ABSTRACT The article demonstrates how food contributed to the Europeanisation of British culture between 1960 and 1975, the period leading up to the 1975 Referendum on membership of the European Community. The analysis identifies the meanings and values associated with Europe in cooking columns in two British broadsheet newspapers, TheTimes and the Observer, and examines how people were encouraged to make identifications with Europe. However, the article demonstrates how the meanings associated with Europe were not monolithic and were inflected by class and gender. In particular, continental culinary practices were associated with the tastes and dispositions of emergent new middle-class formations. More generally, the analysis demonstrates how these representations of European food offered middle-class people ways to experiment with feeling European in their everyday lives. In a Brexit context in which much research has asked why British people rejected Europe, the article seeks to contribute to a parallel history of how so many other British people came to identify as European through engagements with popular culture.

HOMOPHOBIA AND ‘UN-AMERICANNESS’ AS RISING FACETS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA: AN ANALYSIS OF ORLANDO SHOOTING MEDIA TRANSCRIPTS

HOMOPHOBIA AND ‘UN-AMERICANNESS’ AS RISING FACETS OF ISLAMOPHOBIA: AN ANALYSIS OF ORLANDO SHOOTING MEDIA TRANSCRIPTS

UK press and tourist discourses of Iran: a study in multiple realities

The aim of this article is to investigate the competing discourses of Iran currently circulating in British society, and their influence on the tourist destination image of that country. A mixed-methods approach was adopted within a social constructionist perspective: this consisted of a Foucauldian discourse analysis of news reports in a range of British broadsheet newspapers, interviews with tourists who had visited Iran, and analysis of travel blogs written by a second group of tourists who had also previously visited the country. The findings show that the leading British broadsheets examined exclusively circulate an extremely negative discourse of Iran-as-Polity, originating in US and mediated by the British political field, whose main components are nuclear issues, danger, hostility and terrorism. Though UK tourists to the country are often drawn there initially by a largely Orientalist discourse of Iran-as-Persia, i.e. as a site of historical monuments, during and post visit, they develop a counter-discourse of Iran-as-Society which concentrates on the modernity of certain aspects of the country and above all the hospitality of its citizens, a discourse which is then further disseminated in the form of travel blogs. The article also mobilises Bourdieu’s concept of academic capital to examine the role of education in providing resources to resist the discourse of Iran-as-Polity. In its range of sources analysed, the article offers a relatively novel approach to investigating the role of media discourse and the internet – the latter framed using Foucault’s ‘genealogical’ approach – in the formation of competing tourist destination images of Iran.

‘Greece will decide the future of Europe’: The recontextualisation of the Greek national elections in a British broadsheet newspaper

This article explores the representation of the Greek national elections in a British broadsheet newspaper and their recontextualisation through the prism of crisis. I focus on speech representation as a recontextualisation device that serves as a bridge between speech production and text consumption. Specifically, the paper addresses the discursive framing of the crisis by focusing on the ‘speakers’, namely the social actors who are represented as speaking, the actions in which they are involved and the power role relationships established between them. I argue that a polarised image of crisis is constructed and that the framing of the Greek elections in this particular broadsheet results in double-voicing that positions Greece as either dependent on or independent of Europe. This double-voicing seems to contribute to the maintenance of domination and social control and helps sustain dominant discourses circulating in the broader socio-cultural context.

“Moomins in English Dress”: British Translations of the Moomin Series

A veritable Moomin mania is currently sweeping the United Kingdom, with a proliferation of soft toys, stationery, board books, and comic strips available in bookshops across the country. New translations of Tove Jansson’s work for an adult audience continue to emerge on a regular basis, alongside the recent appearances of Puffin gift-edition hardbacks of the Moomin novels and retranslations of her three Moomin picture books. The series is now an indisputably well-established global phenomenon, and the British translations have played a vital part in making these books widely available across the international literary community (Warburton, “Tretti ar pa Schildts”). This article presents a chronological and descriptive overview of the history of Jansson’s works in British translation, and as such falls into the field of publishing and book history. Little is known about the history of this publishing gamble by London-based firm Ernest Benn, who persevered unwaveringly in their commitment to the series at a time when Tove Jansson was an entirely unknown Finnish author with no established reputation or record of commercial success within the English-speaking publishing world. Conversely, such is her standing now in the United Kingdom that Jansson’s obituary featured prominently in major British broadsheet newspapers such as The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, and The Daily Telegraph on her death in June 2001. British researchers have shown little sustained interest in the world of Tove Jansson, despite the fact that the Moomin series has been in continual print since 1950 when the first title in English made its debut. Ironically, there has been slightly more academic interest demonstrated in the United States where the series has had an extremely patchy publishing history since the appearance of The Happy Moomins by Bobbs-Merrill in 1952, with the complete series only available for the first time in the 1970s as

Searching for similarity using corpus-assisted discourse studies

It has often been noted that corpus-assisted discourse analysis is inherently comparative (e.g., Partington, 2009 ), but, in this paper, I want to emphasise that such comparison does not exclusively entail the analysis of difference and that the analysis of similarity can be productively incorporated into the framework. As Baker (2006 : 182) notes, the way that differences and similarities interact with each other is ‘an essential part of any comparative corpus-based study of discourse’. In this paper, first, I outline why the search for similarity is relevant to the analysis of discourse using corpus linguistics; I then go on to assess some possible ways of doing this; and, finally, I take the representation of boy/s and girl/s in British broadsheet newspapers as an example.

Newspaper discourse informalisation: a diachronic comparison from keywords

In this paper, I provide an overview of certain types of salient items found in the keyword lists of the SiBol 1993 and SiBol 2005 corpora with the objective of diachronic analysis of a particular text type, namely, that of British broadsheet newspapers. I analysed the keyword lists (see Partington, 2010 : Section 2 ) in search of items that could be assigned to semantic sets, which could be glossed as hyperbole, vagueness and informal evaluation. The appearance of these sets in the keywords for 2005 seems to point to changes over time in newspaper prose style. The newspapers under consideration thus appear to have altered both in their function and in their relationship with their readership; and this is reflected in the salient lexis and its contexts of use. An increase in conversational and informal styles emerges, along with a notable increase in a particular kind of evaluative and promotional language as a result of a proportional increase in soft news, supplements and reviews.

Newspaper discourse informalisation: a diachronic comparison from keywords

In this paper, I provide an overview of certain types of salient items found in the keyword lists of the SiBol 1993 and SiBol 2005 corpora with the objective of diachronic analysis of a particular text type, namely, that of British broadsheet newspapers. I analysed the keyword lists (see Partington, 2010: Section 2) in search of items that could be assigned to semantic sets, which could be glossed as hyperbole, vagueness and informal evaluation. The appearance of these sets in the keywords for 2005 seems to point to changes over time in newspaper prose style. The newspapers under consideration thus appear to have altered both in their function and in their relationship with their readership; and this is reflected in the salient lexis and its contexts of use. An increase in conversational and informal styles emerges, along with a notable increase in a particular kind of evaluative and promotional language as a result of a proportional increase in soft news, supplements and reviews.

Fu Manchu versus Dr Livingstone in the Dark Continent? Representing China, Africa and the West in British broadsheet newspapers

In recent years diplomatic and economic relations between China and many African countries have deepened. This has been driven largely by China's remarkable economic growth, which has increased demand for energy and commodities, thus encouraging trade and investment with different African countries. Additionally, China is playing a key role in the emerging challenge to the unequal architecture of global trade and governance, for which it seeks political allies. For Africa, the impacts of these deepening relationships are mixed. Rising commodity prices, direct investment, aid, and cheap consumer goods can be beneficial; but China also threatens to undercut local manufacturing sectors and compete for export markets, notably in textiles. China also has a history of support for authoritarian and corrupt regimes, and its (stated) insistence on non-interference in sovereign affairs may undermine more progressive efforts towards accountability, transparency, conflict reduction, and environmental and social protection. This paper explores how UK broadsheet newspapers represent China's complex relations in Africa, and in doing so, how they reflect on the West's own role(s) in Africa. The paper concludes by debating the importance of these media images at a time when China's rise is being anxiously observed by western publics and policy communities.

Arguing about Muslims: (Un)Reasonable argumentation in letters to the editor

AbstractThis article analyses letters to the editor written on or about Muslims printed in a British broadsheet newspaper. The pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation is applied as a model for explaining and understanding the arguments employed in the sampled letters. Our presentation of pragma-dialectical theory focuses on argumentative reasonableness. More specifically, we introduce the four dialectical stages through which any argument must pass and explain the ten rules of critical discussion that participants must follow throughout if they are to resolve the argument. The article focuses in particular on the letter writers' use of argument schemes—that is, the manner in which these writers use arguments to support their standpoints. We conclude by highlighting the role that unreasonable arguments can play in perpetuating racialized inequalities and hence the importance of analyzing argumentation.

Review of <i>(Mis)Representing Islam: the racism and rhetoric of British Broadsheet Newspapers</i>

Review of <i>(Mis)Representing Islam: the racism and rhetoric of British Broadsheet Newspapers</i>

Review of <i>(Mis)Representing Islam: the racism and rhetoric of British Broadsheet Newspapers</i>

Review of <i>(Mis)Representing Islam: the racism and rhetoric of British Broadsheet Newspapers</i>

Representations of Hosts in Travel Writing: The Guardian Travel Section

In this paper, we examine representations of hosts to tourist destinations covered in journalistic travel reports published in the Travel Section of the Saturday edition of the British broadsheet newspaper The Guardian in 1997. Methodologically, the paper is anchored within the constructionist view of discourse, i.e. we assume that in the linguistic representation of people, places, or events, discursive choices not only describe the reality but also construct its ideologically preferred version. We demonstrate that in the travel reports examined here, local people tend to be represented in three principal categories: (1) homogeneous ethnic or social group; (2) observed bearers of the 'national' or 'community' characteristics; or (3) as 'featureless' helpers to the travellers. Arguing that these representations are constitutive of Foucauldian regimes of truth we propose that the reports are a means of constructing a known and tamed reality that is safe for the readers/prospective tourists to travel to.

The future of the British broadsheet newspaper on the World Wide Web

Traditional media, such as newspapers, are having to reassess their role in the Internet age. Not only are newspapers having to compete with each other, but also with foreign newspapers from all over the globe and their information providers choosing to deliver news on their websites. The aim of this paper is to determine the present state and the future of the British newspaper on the World Wide Web. An evaluation of the five British broadsheet websites was carried out between 11th August and 11th September 2000. Three broad categories were selected to evaluate the websites information content, interactivity and business and marketing features. Interviews were also carried out in order to gauge the opinion of journalists, information specialists and New Media professionals as to the future path for newspapers. The results showed that newspapers, to a certain extent, are still repurposing their hard copy content for the Web. However, online newspapers are making some advances by maximising their content and by developing discussion forums and feedback mechanisms. FT.com has made the greatest effort to reassess its purpose on the Internet. The interview results showed that there is no clear strategy for the future of newspapers on the WWW. However, what became clear was the opinion that newspapers should concentrate on targeting a local audience, facilitating community publishing and investing in research. All stress that whatever move they make, newspapers must make one and fast.

Troubled Men and Threatening Women: The Construction of `Crisis' in Male Mental Health

In recent years, the development of an apparent `crisis' in male well-being (and, more specifically, in male mental health) has become a focus of media and academic interest. This crisis has been linked to disruptions in the traditional system of gender relations, with men being problematically positioned within a changed social context, especially in relation to issues of emotion. In this study, articles on men's health in a British broadsheet newspaper are subjected to discourse analysis to examine the ways in which the crisis in male mental health has been rhetorically constructed. The analysis suggests that it is constructed as arising from the enactment of a traditional, hegemonic masculinity (seen as militating against emotional expression), gender role changes in the employment and sexual domains and the advance of women. Despite an apparent acknowledgement of a need for change, alternative enactments of masculinity are undermined. The implications of these analyses are explored.