British Tabloid Research Articles

The transfeminine mystique: Transsexual models and the UK press, 1960–71

The article investigates transgender embodiment, public feelings and (in)visibility in the British press in the 1960s and early 1970s by using the models and performers April Ashley (1935–2021) and Amanda Lear (1939–present) as case studies. Both Ashley and Lear worked as performers at the celebrated Parisian cabaret bar Le Carrousel in the 1950s, and later moved to London independently. Ashley – white, British, working class – enjoyed a successful but brief career as a commercial model that was cut short following her outing by a British tabloid in 1961. Lear – of French and alleged south-east Asian origins – associated herself with the fashionable Chelsea set in London in the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing on press articles, fashion editorials, documentaries and autobiographical writing, in this article, I reconstruct the two models’ career trajectories and examine how the British media constructed Ashley and Lear as both objects of disgust and exotic objects of fascination. In doing so, I critically assess their respective attempts to navigate these public feelings in relation to the politics of (in)visibility in the contemporary British media landscape.

Shocktainment Techniques in the Mirror, a British Daily Tabloid: Linguocultural Features of news and semantic-cognitive Analysis of Leading Concepts.

This study analyzed 300 news articles from the online version of the British daily tabloid The Mirror. Quantitative analysis showed that shocktainment elements are present in 150 news articles out of 300. The results showed that some shocktainment categories are either incompletely presented or lose to other categories. At the same time, the techniques of familiarity (800), absurdity (908), outrage (5,105), influence (4,200), and persuasion (1,101) are used much less frequently than others. The study proved that the authors of the articles actively use shocktainment techniques since they allow the authors to explain the linguocultural features of the country to the readers easily and understandably. The analysis also revealed the main topics that are disclosed in news articles with the use of shocktainment and trigger cognitive processes in readers. The study results can help to correct theoretical and empirical gaps in the research on news media discourse.

Sexualising weight loss in British tabloids

This paper explores the relationship between weight loss, sex and beauty by analysing a corpus of 285 articles about celebrity weight loss published in the UK national press between 23 March 2020 and 6 July 2020. Taking a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis approach, we examine the use of the statistically salient lemma flaunt*. Ninety-seven per cent of the instances of flaunt* in our corpus are attributed to female celebrities, and the respective protagonists are reported by the UK press to flaunt their bodies and their weight loss on their social media pages. By critically analysing the use of flaunt*, we are able to demonstrate the manner in which celebrity social media posts are repackaged to sexualise female celebrities and to sexualise the process of weight loss in general. We argue that describing social media images shared by female celebrities as flaunting could at best, misrepresent their intentions, and at worst contribute towards the pervasive unsolicited sexualisation of women, and exacerbate adverse body image and mental health issues during the COVID-19 pandemic which in and of itself has exacerbated these issues.

Manipulative Use of Proper Names of Famous People in the British Tabloids 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑆𝑢𝑛 and 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑦 𝑀𝑖𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑟

Manipulative Use of Proper Names of Famous People in the British Tabloids 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑆𝑢𝑛 and 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑎𝑖𝑙𝑦 𝑀𝑖𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑟

The Brexit campaign in British tabloids: The role of passives in the process of positive self- and negative other-presentation

Abstract This paper examines the local syntax in 65 articles from the British mid-market tabloids, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, covering the pre-Brexit vote period (February-June 2016). The paper focuses on the passive constructions in the chosen corpus and the main objective is to examine their role and function in a traditionally conservative and anti-EU discourse through an analysis of the sampled data set within the qualitative theoretical and methodological framework of CDA. The results point at an intricate network of both agentless and passives with agents contributing to both positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation as the dominant strategies of manipulation in the examined discourse. This paper is part of the AILA Europe special issue.

Tabloid Tales: How the British Tabloid Press Shaped the Brexit Vote

AbstractThis article focuses on the role of the British tabloid press (BTP), and specifically the eurosceptic press, as a ‘supply‐side’ influence on the 2016 EU referendum. First, we focus on the BTP and its role as an ‘agenda‐setter’ in shaping eurosceptic discourse regarding the UK's relationship with the EU. Second, we use content analysis of five tabloid newspapers – The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Express and The Daily Star to demonstrate the disproportionate pro‐Brexit discourse prior to, and during, the EU referendum campaign. Third, drawing on opinion poll data, we show how this ‘bombardment’ approach influenced the electorate in the referendum campaign. Given the ‘knowledge deficit’ about the EU in the UK, we conclude that the BTP had a significant bearing on tipping the referendum vote towards Brexit.

Loners, Criminals, Mothers: The Gendered Misrecognition of Refugees in the British Tabloid News Media

Misrecognition has been conceptualised as an act of recognition that is ‘distorted’ or ‘incomplete’, and can be used to capture the differentiated experience of social and/or political phenomena by different individuals. In this article, we apply the concept of misrecognition to the visual representation of refugees in the British tabloid news media. The article presents a novel two-step analysis which combines visual analysis of a representative sample of British tabloid newspaper coverage of refugees with an analysis of a representative sample of this coverage by two focus groups of tabloid newspaper readers. In taking this approach, we capture the role of audiences in constructing the meanings of the images, a perspective largely absent from the literature to date. The findings show that a gendered misrecognition shapes the visual construction of refugees by this media and its audience, with women more likely to be recognised as refugees and (mis)recognised as vulnerable mothers, and men more likely to be misrecognised as loners and criminals and less likely to be recognised as refugees. Reflecting on the findings, we argue that misrecognition is a critical concept in understanding the politics of marginalisation constructed by the tabloid news media.

A Critical Discourse Study on Meghan and Harry’s CBS Primetime Interview

This study focuses on Meghan and Harry’s narratives in the CBS Primetime interview with Oprah Winfrey where they highlighted the issues they faced before moving to America. During the interview, the couple raised several bombshells ranging from the lack of freedom, to Archie’s royal title and security, racism, and the lack of support and guidance from the Royal Family, which negatively portrayed the Royal Family and British tabloids. Using van Dijk’s ideological square model and its discursive strategies as a framework, this study examines how the Duke and Duchess of Sussex linguistically construct the self-other representations that are evident in their interview via critical discourse analysis and narrative inquiry approach. Findings show that the couple most commonly employed discursive strategies such as victimisation, vagueness, disclaimers, comparisons, evidentiality, hyperbole, history as a lesson, generalisation, pseudo-ignorance, implications, distancing, openness, and polarisation of us versus them. In doing so, they represented themselves as positive, while portraying the British tabloids and the Royal Family as the negative-other. Consequently, the use of language in this interview narrative may legitimise the Duke and Duchess of Sussex while suppress the Royal family and British tabloids. This paper is timely as it is only through in-depth analysis of the linguistic features that we are able to unveil ideological presupposition and biases underlying the interview. It also serves to educate the public that there is always more than one side to a story. Therefore, we should avoid having any biases or ideological presupposition towards anyone in any event before the truth is revealed from both sides.

‘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.

Crisis within the crisis

This essay investigates the representation of children’s mental health in the UK press in the period immediately prior to the onset of and during the first 16 months of the Covid-19 pandemic, up to June 2021, during which, after the first wave of infections, a hard lockdown and a partial reopening, a resurgence of the virus after the summer months required the reintroduction of distancing measures, amid growing concerns for children and their mental health as a result of prolonged isolation. Based on a collection of articles from the British quality and tabloid press, the study takes a corpus-driven approach combined with discourse analysis, and identifies salient lexical features which not only provide an outline of the dominant concerns in children’s mental health discourse, but also of the way it was framed across the period considered. Prior to the pandemic, the ‘crisis’ frame dominated. The discourse of children’s mental health was characterised by alarm, urgency and a call for immediate action. In the first part of the pandemic, the crisis frame was hijacked by the pandemic itself. The dominant frame for the topic of children’s mental health was that of risk, which projected the concerns into an uncertain future. In the last period considered, the ‘risk’ frame was replaced by an ‘impact’ frame, which was characterised by greater control and less uncertainty. The findings suggest that, while the salience of children’s mental health in the press continued to be high, the frame shifts blunted the agenda-setting momentum which characterised the pre-pandemic period.

From Kisstory to Megxile

While the year 2020 will undoubtedly be remembered for the sudden and unexpected worldwide expansion of COVID–19, which has threatened humans globally, the year 2021 is being marked by news related to the fight, vaccination and immunization against the coronavirus. However, in both years some, comparatively secondary, developments took place which were also relevant at other areas of interest. This is the case with the events surrounding the British Royal Family, especially after the interview with Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, by the renowned US journalist and TV presenter, Oprah Winfrey, on 7 March 2021. The interview took place following the couple's decision in 2020 to step down from their duties as senior members of the Royal Family. Both this decision and the interview, which contained uncomfortable allegations against the Royal Family, have had a clear and widespread impact on the media at different levels. Thus, the British tabloids have played a very important role in Harry and Meghan's story.

The UK as victim and hero in the Sun’s coverage of the Brexit ‘humiliation’

This paper discusses how emotions were mobilised by the British tabloid press as discursive strategies of persuasion during the public debate on the implementation of Brexit. Using the case study of the Suns coverage of the alleged UKs humiliation at the Salzburg meeting (2018) during the Brexit negotiations, the analysis addresses the questions of how and through which linguistic means actors and events were framed discursively in such an article. The findings suggest that The Sun elicited emotions of fear, frustration, pride, and freedom to frame Brexit along a long-established narrative of domination and national heroism. The discourse was also sustained by a discursive prosody in keeping with a satirical genre and a populist register that have often characterised the British tabloid press. In particular the linguistic analysis has shown how antagonistic representations of the UK and the EU were driven by an allegory of incompetent gangsterism and morally justified resistance. Emotionalisation in the article was thus aimed both at ridiculing the EU and at representing it as a criminal organisation. Such framing was instrumental in pushing the newspaper agenda as much as in legitimising and institutionalising harder forms of Brexit with the tabloids readership. Approaching journalist discourse at the intersection of affective, stylistic, and political dimensions of communication, this paper extends the body of literature on the instrumental use of emotive arguments and populist narratives and on the wider historical role of tabloid journalism in representing political relations. between the UK and the EU.

A comparative study of HEALTH in newspaper articles of the 1980s and 2000s: a corpus based analysis

The notion of health is of vital importance for the society. The research analyses and compares the corpora processed with the help of Sketch Engine. The collocations with HEALTH taken from The Guardian 80 and modern as well as The Mirror 80 and modern are in the focus of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. While the analysis such research methods were used as: discourse and critical analyses are used to study collocations with HEALTH in British broadsheets and tabloids; corpus analysis – to single out key words representing HEALTH in the corpus broadsheets and tabloids; contextual-interpretative analysis – to establish specifics features of discursive representation of the collocations with HEALTH in the media discourse and tabloids; quantitative analysis – to interpret and compare results obtained. The collocations chosen for this research are nouns modified by HEALTH. The n-grams show the differences and similarities as for the health collocations in The Guardian 80/The Mirror 80, The Guardian modern/The Mirror modern as well as The Guardian 80/The Guardian modern and The Mirror 80/The Mirror modern. The findings of the study show top health collocations, such as health care, health problem, health benefit, health issue, health expert, health support. The frequency of their being used in the newspaper discourse can vary in the broadsheet or the tabloid. Besides, newspaper discourse accentuates certain problems revealed in the life of the society either in the 80s or nowadays. The research reveals the health collocation differences between two different newspapers as well as between the newspapers with the same name at different times. The analysis shows that the newspaper discourse reflects the idea promoted by the societal health approaches.

VAGUENESS AND DISSOCIATION IN ENGLISH POLITICAL NEWS DISCOURSE

The main goal of this paper is to indicate the importance of the issues of vagueness and dissociation in discourse interpretation. The discourse that is taken into consideration is the discourse of political news written in the English language. This particular discourse is widely available to readers and deals with important political issues, which is why the choice of words and phrases should ideally be unbiased and accurate. If not, the readers may misinterpret the discourse and have a wrong impression of the political issue. In this research, newspaper articles are taken as an example of political news discourse. All articles analyzed were written in online British and American broadsheet and tabloid newspapers and they all dealt with the migrant crisis and 2019 Hong Kong protests. By taking into consideration the political context and the theoretical framework used in this research, 44 instances considered to be examples of vagueness and dissociation were identified, which were found in 14 newspaper articles.

THE EFFECT OF RACISM IN THE MEDIA TO DEAL WITH MIGRATION

Migration is associated with important global issues, including development, poverty, and human rights. Migrants are frequently the most dynamic members of society; migration has historically aided economic development, the rise of nations, and the enrichment of cultures. It also presents significant challenges. The article is based on Halliday´s systematic functional grammar in terms of transitivity and modality. The aim of this article is to investigate the transitivity and modalities of migration as it appears in a number of British tabloids. The focus is on aspects of racism in the media and how to deal with the migration phenomenon. It is important to see how the media plays a role in the reproduction of racism. This article shows attitudes to migration as they have appeared in British periodicals over the last few years. It´s obvious that the role of the media in the reproduction of racism is inextricably linked to the general characteristics of racism and white domination in society, particularly the structural and ideological structuring of that kind of group power. This highlights the press's function as a business, social, and cultural institution. The press has to be examined in connection with the institutions of the economy and the political as well ‎.

DEGREES OF LATENCY OF ECOLOGICAL DISCOURSE AGENT (A CASE STUDY OF BRITISH ONLINE NEWSPAPERS)

This article proposes a study of degrees of latency of the agent, which is a semantic role performed by a participant of the communicative situation described in a sentence; this role correlates with the instigator of the action. The agent can be expressed explicitly, so that everybody understands who the action is performed by, or in a hidden, latent way. Drawing on Goatly’s (2018) research which demonstrates that degrees of agent’s latency can vary, we modify his scale of latency by taking into consideration non-verbal (visual) means. A great societal concern for environmental issues around the globe nowadays, together with the ecolinguistic vector of this research account for its timeliness. The purpose of this research is to identify the degrees of latency of the agent of environmental discourse. Syntactic constructions, lexical units, and visual images that render the agent were chosen as the object-matter of analysis, while the degrees of latency – as its subject-matter. The methods comprise general scientific methods, such as induction and deduction, synthesis and analysis, observation and contrast, as well as linguistic methods proper: critical discourse analysis, semantic analysis, and multimodal analysis. The sample is selected from online versions of most widely read British newspapers, both broadsheets and tabloids, The Guardian and Metro respectively. A modified scale of degrees of agent’s latency is suggested, where six categories of linguistic means are differentiated according to the degree of their latency. Explicit predication is characterized by a zero degree of latency; its measure increases in grammatical constructions, tropes, nominalizations, ellipsis, and indefinite agent respectively. The prospects of this research lie in comparison and quantitative counts of the agent’s latency in different types of British media.

A Question of Contrast: Unpacking the Mail Online’s Depiction of Meghan Markle’s Royal Motherhood

Working from a cultural studies perspective, this article explores how contrast, as a rhetorical device, is used by the Mail Online, a British tabloid, to cast Meghan Markle as “threatening” the monarchy and, by extension, traditional notions of British identity. One of the principal ways this conflict is constructed is through repeated comparisons between Markle and her sister-in-law Kate Middleton. Contrasted with Middleton, the Mail Online positions Markle as dominating, nontraditional, and pushy. Concurrently, contrasted with “unorthodox” Markle, the once-maligned Middleton is reinvented and venerated as a reassuringly “normal” royal. This article unpacks these dynamics, arguing that the Mail Online’s coverage of Markle is an example of how long-standing racialized, classed, and sexist stereotypes are being reconfigured in the digital era, reflecting a wider instability around cultural notions of Britishness in a post-Brexit world.

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.

“How Any Woman Does What They Do Is Beyond Comprehension”: Media Representations of Meghan Markle’s Maternity

In 2019–2020, Meghan Markle was one of the most intensely mediated mothers in the anglophone media. This article examines how U.K. and U.S. media representations of Markle negotiate, trouble, challenge, regulate, and reassert the boundaries and meanings of contemporary motherhood. Situating Markle’s mediated representations in the context of the increasing visibility and shifting meanings of motherhood in contemporary culture, and particularly in the context of the growing visibility of voices and accounts of “mothering while Black,” we examine the mediation of Markle’s maternity in three moments: (1) Prince Harry’s announcement of the birth; (2) Markle’s public outing with the baby, her later interview for an ITV documentary, and the lawsuit she filed against the British tabloid Mail on Sunday; and (3) the royal couple’s South Africa tour. We conclude by examining a fourth mediated moment—“Megxit”—and highlight the mediation of Markle’s maternity as a site that might open up a space for rewriting motherhood, and particularly Black motherhood, however limited that space may be.

It’s Just Not Cricket!

The world of cricket was stunned by the ‘spot-fixing’ allegations against three Pakistani cricket team players during one of the most important games in the cricket calendar for the nation in the summer of 2010. News of the World, a British tabloid, conducted a sting operation against Pakistani players, trapping them into deliberately bowling no-balls during a match against England, an illegal practice known as spot-fixing. The ‘bookies’ take bets for such events happening during a game, and gamblers can make substantial sums of money if they have foreknowledge. The players were offered payments for these actions to be performed during the game, which may or may not impact the eventual outcome of the game but can entail serious monetary benefits for the bookies and their allies. The discovery of these events raised several questions regarding the governance and ethics of the sport. The ICC and British courts subsequently found the trio guilty of corruption and were banned and imprisoned. This case aims to analyse theories and concepts in ethics using this well-known incident in cricket as the context.