British Broadsheet Research Articles

From opponents to enemies? How the British press framed the EU–UK relationship in Brexit news

ABSTRACT In contemporary democracies, the media plays a crucial role. How the press addresses issues concerning the European Union and its relationships with member states profoundly influences political discourse and public opinion. As an ‘awkward partner’, the United Kingdom has consistently had a complex relationship with the EU, predominantly regarding questions of identity and sovereignty. Within this political context, British newspapers are widely regarded as highly sensitive to EU-UK conflict, employing media rhetoric that underscores a form of destructive dissent associated with threats to sovereignty and identity in the face of a German-dominated Europe. Furthermore, the 2016 Brexit referendum notably exacerbated the EU and the UK divide. This article investigates the prominence of the EU-UK relationship and its portrayal in British media coverage of Brexit. To achieve this, the study analyses news articles published by two British broadsheet newspapers and two tabloids between 1 February 2020 and 31 December 2020.

The British Broadsheet Press and the Representation of “The Mosque” in the Aftermath of Post-7/7 Britain

The role of the mosque has become increasingly vital, particularly in contemporary societies such as Britain, where both the place and status of religion in public life are constantly discussed and debated. Indeed, in the contemporary period, the role of the mosque has several dimensions, ranging from a social space, educational and cultural exchange, and community cohesion centre to a knowledge hub. In this context, this paper suggests that a mosque should be seen as an independent religious institution, although these are influenced by and responsive to governments, elites, pressure groups, public bodies, etc. Using a thematic analysis of news items in The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph over a period of two years (8 July 2005–7 July 2007), it finds that in the aftermath of 7/7, the mosque as a religious place and an institution for British Muslims is largely seen as incompatible and a threat to secular British society and that it is linked with radicalisation and terrorism. According to Quranic texts and revelations, it is indeed a fact that mosques are open to all. This is logical since God’s mercy, love, and forgiveness are for all of mankind without any distinction, which is perhaps why the mosque has been the sacred house of God Himself. This study aims to reveal the development of visible hostility in some sections of the British media and political campaigns. Moreover, it intends to trace the determination and idea of the mosque as a religious place and an institution for British Muslims rather than only a place for worship. Finally, this study will argue the role of the mosque in promoting community cohesion and mutual understanding within the Muslim and other faith communities located in Britain.

A Rhetorical Stylistic Analysis of English Political Headlines in Selected Newspapers

This study explores the language used in reporting political headlines conducting a rhetorical stylistic analysis. It is based on showing the effect of the rhetorical stylistic relations in news reporting. The aim is to investigate the structure adopted in reporting political news. It argues that the rhetorical stylistic devices are necessary and applicable to non-literary texts, i.e. political headlines to evaluate language use in the representation of non-literary texts. The analysis was carried out on data selected from the British broadsheet The Guardian and the American New York Times newspaper headlines. The data were examined and subjected to a contrastive analysis incorporating rhetorical and stylistic tools to discern how they are united to achieve the main purpose of language use, i.e. to persuade and grasp the reader's attention. It was found that the two newspapers tend to employ sentence structures differently in terms of nucleus and satellite relations demonstrating the significant part in a sentence. Examples of the deviation strategy of foregrounding were primarily established in the New York Times to maintain the reader's attention about the content underlying the different strategy of the two newspapers to report war circumstances. The analysis shows that rhetorical devices and stylistic features are found and closely related in newspaper 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”.

‘COVID Casablanca’: A case of Dubai’s British social media influencers and postdigital intermedia geographies

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, British social media influencers posted pictures and stories from Dubai. As a result, the emirate faced an intense backlash from the British media. This study considers the British media’s motivations for constituting Dubai as Orientalist ‘other’ while uncovering earlier imagined geographies of the Orient. The study develops the novel concept of ‘intermedia geographies’ to trace intertextual links, tales, texts, content, audiences and discourses, as dynamic constellations of the postdigital condition. Unique methods of postdigital critical discourse analysis are developed to map a corpus of 20 British magazine, tabloid and broadsheet newspaper articles, which are the jumping-off point to intertextual references to television, film and earlier Oriental narratives. Theorizing levels up from description to nuanced analysis to illustrate that the themes of content, stance and social actors’ positioning within the corpus are indicative of Britain’s siloed mainstream audiences and postdigital reinforcements of colonial discourse.

Representation of Turkey in the News on the Cyprus Problem: An Analysis on the British Press (2000)

This study aims to explore the representation of Turkey in the British news texts covering the Cyprus problem in the 2000s. The article goes on to question how the British broadsheet press represents Turkey, as one of the role-playing states in the fate of Cyprus. Using Said’s Orientalism and Young’s White Mythology as a theoretical basis for evaluation, a qualitative content analysis was utilized upon 45 news texts. Findings established that the othering of Turks was alive during this period. The British press portrayed Turkish people involved in the Cyprus problem as ‘dark-skinned Turks’, ‘from underdeveloped eastern Anatolia’ that ‘wear Islamic dress and have large families’ and are ‘settlers’ invaders or occupiers on the Cyprus island. Comparatively, the other role-players in the Cyprus problem (Greece, Greek Cypriots, and Turkish Cypriots) were less frequently Orientalized and not in the traditional sense, as presented by Said, their level of being orientalized relating to their relations with the British.

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.

Exploring ideological messages in newspaper editorials and news reports on the first human gene-editing case

This chapter explores evaluative standpoints, opinions and potentially ideologically charged messages in newspaper editorials and news reports covering the birth of the first human gene-edited twins. The corpus under analysis consists of British tabloid and broadsheet news reports and editorials covering the case. The analysis is carried out applying the combined paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis, Argumentation Theory and Appraisal Theory, with a predominantly linguistic focus. The evidence adduced indicates that most news reports and editorials pass negative evaluative messages starting from their headlines and ending with the local textual structures. The readership is oriented towards a given interpretation of the event using negative judgment and negative affect derived from the headline. The texts of news reports and editorials demonstrate overlapping sequences of evaluation and argumentation. News reports tend to provide the reader with a more explicit yet depersonalised evaluation of the event, as the responsibility for the opinion expressed is shifted to third parties through the mechanism of attribution. Editorials, on the other hand, tend to argue the preferred outlook by syntactic structures and, specifically, concessive constructions and concur-counter patterns.

‘Queen of Scots’: The monarch’s body and national identities in the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum

On 20 September 2014, in the wake of the Scottish Independence Referendum, the pro-union, right-wing British broadsheet The Daily Telegraph’ s front page was dominated by a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II in the grounds of her Balmoral Estate in the Scottish Highlands, under the headline ‘Queen’s pledge to help reunite the Kingdom’. This article takes the headline as a departure point through which to explore competing discourses of national identity during the Independence Referendum. Understanding the Queen’s body as a site of symbolic struggle over these discourses, this article undertakes visual analysis to unpack the composition of the photograph, in order to understand its social, historical, political and cultural meanings. In so doing, it argues that the use of ‘Queen of Scots’ in The Daily Telegraph at the specific conjunctural moment of the Scottish Independence Referendum reveals the complex intersections between monarchy, power, (geo)politics, symbolism, sovereignty, national identity/identities and landscape in the United Kingdom.

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

NEWSPAPER PORTRAYAL OF TEACHERS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF REPRESENTATIONS OF TEACHERS IN A BRITISH AND A CZECH BROADSHEET

The study compares representations of teachers in the Czech broadsheet Mladá fronta and the British broadsheet The Daily Telegraph, aiming to reveal their possible impact on the level of public respect towards teachers. The methodology employed is critical discourse analysis, combining an investigation of semantic macrostructures and recurrent transitivity patterns. It is revealed that both newspapers call attention to problems regarding the teaching profession, advocating social change and higher job prestige. The social significance of a teacher is enhanced in both newspapers by allocating a teacher not only the role of a transmitter of knowledge but also a moral guide concerned with social issues. The main difference between the two broadsheets is that The Daily Telegraph foregrounds teachers’ wrongdoings, while Mladá fronta highlights teachers’ accomplishments. This seems to be mainly due to the inclusion of a section with regional content in the Czech broadsheet.

Denominal verbs with metaphorical meanings in British business media discourse

AbstractThis study is a corpus-based examination of denominal verbs with figurative meanings in the British business broadsheet The “Financial Times”. Based on the study of word-formation as the source of metaphoricity (Brdar & Brdar-Szabó, 2013;Janda, 2011,2014;Steen et al., 2010) and propositional analysis (Pankrats, 1992;Steen, 2002), it presents the classification of such verbs, and discusses how and why denominal verbs with metaphorical meanings were used in the journalistic discourse about business. The empirical base of this study was a 621,000 word corpus of articles from The “Financial Times” from the years 2014–2015. The authors conclude that the frequency of denominal verbs is due to the conceptual and evaluative functions of metaphor. There is consideration of the implications of these findings for linguists, translators, ESP students and those interested in corpus research into metaphor.

Football in the hands of the other: Qatar's World Cup in the British broadsheet press

Using reportage of the 2022 World Cup taken from The Telegraph and The Guardian, this paper demonstrates how Bhaba's ‘dynamics of writing and textuality’ are implemented to represent an Orientalist discourse that describes Qatar in colonial terms. Citing work by cultural critics such as Edward Said and Stuart Hall, it is argued that the British media constructs such a discourse to re-assert a form of colonial dominance which has historically greatly benefitted the former. Adapting theoretical frameworks on ‘grammars of exchange’ by Said and on mimicry by Homi Bhaba, it is contended that the British media's dominance allows it to replicate the process of knowledge formation that enabled colonial discourse to thrive throughout the 19th century, and that Qatar's success in mimicking many of the cultural attributes of the West has transformed it into a viable threat which must be controlled. The paper concludes by arguing that the cultural narrative of Qatar conveyed to global audiences by the British media i...

Fundamental evaluative adjective patterns in british broadsheet and tabloid newspaper discourse

Fundamental evaluative adjective patterns in british broadsheet and tabloid newspaper discourse

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

Media discourses of low carbon housing: The marginalisation of social and behavioural dimensions within the British broadsheet press

Decarbonising housing is a key UK government policy to mitigate climate change. Using discourse analysis, we assess how low carbon housing is portrayed within British broadsheet media. Three distinct storylines were identified. Dominating the discourse, Zero carbon housing promotes new-build, low carbon houses as offering high technology solutions to the climate problem. Retrofitting homes emphasises the need to reduce emissions within existing housing, tackling both climate change and rising fuel prices. A more marginal discourse, Sustainable living, frames low carbon houses as related to individual identities and 'off-grid' or greener lifestyles. Our analysis demonstrates that technical and economic paradigms dominate media discourse on low carbon housing, marginalising social and behavioural aspects.