Scottish Newspapers Research Articles

Highland Gypsy Travellers in the News: A Note on Prejudices as Reflected in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers in the Highlands

This note considers some of the reporting on Highland Gypsy Travellers by journalists writing in northern Scottish newspapers in the mid- and late-nineteenth century and illustrates the nature and extent of prejudices against this group. It shows how these prejudices were displayed even by those who advocated for Highlanders, opposed oppression and showed sympathy towards the plight of Travellers. These include Hugh Miller, writing in the Inverness Courier, John Mackie in the John o’ Groat Journal and Northern Ensign, and Thomas Mulock in the Inverness Advertiser. These writers, while rejecting the claim that there were innate differences between ‘races of men’, generally held that some peoples had fallen into a ‘degraded state’ from which it was the duty of Christians to rescue them. This was similar to the approach often taken towards colonised peoples, for example towards First Nations children in Canada. The note briefly considers two areas of legislation which had an impact in Highland Gypsy Travellers – the Vagrancy Act, extended to Scotland in 1871, and the Education Acts of the 1870s.

Constructing legitimation in Scottish newspapers: The case of the independence referendum

This study is concerned with the use of epistemic legitimising strategies in online newspaper articles dealing with the Scottish referendum. In this sense, we seek to explore cases of epistemic stance that indicate epistemological positioning and persuade readers of the veracity of propositions. Our study covers Scottish journal articles published online within 5 days prior to results day. In this article, we are interested in the way the Scottish newspapers deal with the topic of the independence referendum and the degree of commitment in journalists’ choice of linguistic strategies. We analysed the newspaper articles manually but corpus tools were also used in order to verify initial findings and for statistical purposes. The results of the use of epistemic stance devices in the different categories were contrasted and our conclusions showed the preferred legitimising strategies used by journalists in the Scottish newspapers.

Drawing National Boundaries in Barr’s Ba-Bru Comic Strip Advertising

Barr’s Irn-Bru (previously Iron Brew), Scotland’s best-known soft drink, was promoted by recurrent comic strip advertisements in Scottish newspapers from 1939 to 1970. ‘The Adventures of Ba-Bru’ featured an eponymous Indian character who was joined by a kilt-wearing companion known as Sandy. This article explores how what the firm presents as the longest-running promotional comic strip in history has helped shape the construction of Scottishness in the drink’s advertising. The exotic nature of the central Ba-Bru figure provides a counterpoint to manifestations of local particularism but also grounds the drink’s discourse on Scottishness in a wider imperial and unionist context. The comic strips also generate examples of intermedial transfer that underline the impact of quotidian consumption habits in a national identity shaped by popular culture.

Mapping discourse coalitions in the minimum unit pricing for alcohol debate: a discourse network analysis of UK newspaper coverage

Background and AimsMinimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol was introduced in Scotland on 1 May 2018, and is now on the policy agenda in other devolved administrations and at Westminster. Previous research has explored the arguments deployed for and against MUP, but the congruence between actors in the MUP debate has not been sufficiently examined. This study identified and mapped the discourse coalitions that emerged in the UK MUP debate through an analysis of actors’ use of arguments in media coverage of the policy debates.DesignA sample of print media coverage of MUP was obtained from the LexisNexis newspaper database. The resulting sample was imported into discourse network analysis (DNA) software for coding and subsequent visualization of actor networks.SettingUnited Kingdom.ObservationsA total of 348 articles from eight UK‐wide and three Scottish newspapers from an 18‐month period, ending in November 2012, were analysed.MeasurementsActors’ arguments were coded to generate structured data for conversion into a weighted actor network where ties represent similarities among actors in terms of arguments in support of or opposition to MUP.FindingsTwo polarized discourse coalitions, Opponents and Proponents of MUP, emerged in media coverage. The Proponents coalition consisted mainly of health advocacy groups, charities, political parties and academic institutions. In the Opponents coalition, the networks were formed of key alcohol manufacturers and economic think‐tanks. While producer organizations were central to the Opponents coalition, some commercial actors were more favourable to MUP, highlighting divisions within the industry overall.ConclusionsMedia coverage of minimum unit pricing (MUP) in Scotland from June 2011 to November 2012 showed alignment between the policy positions of (1) alcohol producers and think‐tanks opposed to MUP; and (2) public health advocates and health charities in favour of the policy. Some alcohol industry actors were supportive of MUP indicating divisions among the industry. Discourse network analysis may be usefully applied to study other highly contested policy issues in health and beyond.

Scottish newspapers and the crisis of the print press: journalistic autonomy and digital transition in a liberal media system

This article examines how members of the Scottish newspaper industry view the current crisis of the print press and the future of their titles. It looks at how newspaper companies are attempting to address the challenges posed by digital transition and competition in a small market, and where they believe the solution to this problem lies. The analysis is based on input from interviews with editors and managers as well as circulation data from the last fifteen years. Findings suggest that, in line with the characteristics of a liberal media system, newspaper organisations believe that it is up to the industry, rather than the state, to resolve this systemic issue and to ensure the survival of their products.

Conflicts in comparison

AbstractIn a globalised world, national discourses are also perceived and commented on in other countries and languages. This paper focuses on newspaper coverage of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum in both Scotland and Germany, comparing two print media corpora in two languages. The linguistic depiction of the arguments and conflicts in Scottish newspapers is compared to the discussion of Scottish independence in German newspapers. In order to find conflictive ‘hotspots’ in both corpora, adversative and concessive connectors of both languages are taken as a starting point for a comparative conflict-oriented discourse analysis in seven steps. Differences and similarities of the most important conflicting concepts as well as the role of stereotypes and language difference are then compared and discussed.

The 2014 Referendum in the Scottish Press

This essay discusses how Scottish newspapers covered the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. It suggests that, in a move away from the positions they had held in the previous decade, indigenous Scottish newspapers openly suggested there was a desire for change in the form of increased devolution. As this option was not on the ballot paper, most of them proposed that increased devolution could still be achieved inside the Union. The mediated debate in the press was not about traditional notions of national identity, but about pragmatic considerations affecting everyday life, such as the future of the economy and public services. Although most of the press in its majority did not support independence, it did not wholeheartedly endorse the status quo either.

Scottish Football and Colonial Zimbabwe: Sport, the Scottish Diaspora, and ‘White Africa’

In 1969 and 1970 respectively, Clyde and Kilmarnock Football Clubs embarked on highly controversial tours of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), then in conflict with the UK over its failure to enact a timetable for majority, non-white rule, and its 1965 unilateral declaration of independence to protect such a system. Despite defying the wishes of the UK Government, these tours were covered very little in Scottish newspapers, and there was little sustained public outcry. This article examines the uneven Scottish and Westminster reactions to the tours (in particular, Kilmarnock's) in the context of broader policies and movements against Rhodesian and South African sport. It also examines Rhodesian press accounts of the trips, which stressed communion with elements of the Scottish diaspora within Rhodesian civic society. It addresses the tours' place within the broader context of work, race and migration during the period 1965–80, when the Rhodesian Front government and its white settler supporters were under continual siege from a multi-pronged nationalist resistance. Critically, this article asks whether or not Scotland and indeed Scottish sport can be extricated from the horrors of decolonisation, in a region where both had deep historic roots.

Suffragettes and the Scottish Press during the First World War

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the coverage of the suffrage movement in Scottish newspapers during the First World War. Suspension of militant action and a re-focus on women’s war work did not mean the complete disappearance of the suffrage campaign from newspapers. However, while militant and non-militant organisations received press coverage for their war work, there were also stories associating suffragettes with the peace effort—or even conspiracies against the state. Volunteers at the Scottish Women’s Hospitals were approvingly described as ‘suffragettes’ but the appellation retained negative connotations when used about peace campaigners. Brave ‘suffragette battalions’ were reported to be arriving in France, but at the same time a politician painted the Germans as ‘the suffragettes of Europe’. Whilst editors wrote enthusiastically of women’s contribution to the war effort, jokes about suffragettes continued to provide light relief. Editorials made the connection between women’s war work and achievement of the vote. However, not all readers were happy with this point of view, with some correspondents attacking what they saw as the suffrage organisations’ opportunistic use of war work and abandonment of working women.

Vulnerable children, stigmatised smokers: The social construction of target audiences in media debates on policies regulating smoking in vehicles.

Following restrictions on smoking in vehicles carrying children in several countries, legislation to safeguard minors from second-hand smoke exposure in vehicles is under-consideration or has been implemented across the United Kingdom. This article presents the first investigation into social constructions of children, smokers and smoking parents in newsprint media and coverage of debates about protecting children from exposure to second-hand smoke in vehicles. Using Scotland as an example, articles on children’s exposure to second-hand smoke published between 1 January 2004 and 16 February 2014 in three Scottish newspapers were identified using Nexis UK. In all, 131 articles were thematically coded and analysed. Children were portrayed as vulnerable and requiring protection, with few articles highlighting children’s ability to voice concerns about the dangers of smoking. Smokers and smoking parents were mainly portrayed in a factual manner, but also frequently as irresponsible and, in some cases, intentionally imposing harm. Individual smokers were blamed for their recklessness, with only a small number of articles mentioning the need to assist smokers in quitting. Supporters of legislation focused on corresponding discourse, whereas critics directed debates towards established arguments against policy, including individual freedom, privacy and problems of enforcement. Focusing on children’s vulnerability to second-hand smoke might have increased support for legislation but risked a side effect of smokers being stigmatised. The media and supporters of public health policy are encouraged to consider appropriate approaches to raise awareness of the health harms of second-hand smoke to children while avoiding unintended stigmatisation of those in which they want to encourage behaviour change.

Press response to women politicians

Celebrity culture and the personalisation of both politics and the media in the last few decades has exacerbated the media’s focus on the appearance of women politicians. However, this article argues that we can see a similar approach to women politicians when they first appeared in newspapers over a hundred years ago. Using evidence from Scottish newspapers’ coverage of the suffragettes in the early twentieth century and comparing it to coverage of contemporary Scottish women politicians, this article demonstrates that the reporting of these early women politicians had the same focus on body and appearance, the same concerns about clothing choices and the same discussion of their domestic lives. However, it is also suggested that, to a certain extent, the construction of the woman politician as different or other and the focus on appearance, bodies and even their maternal role was part of a discourse promoted by the suffragettes themselves in their campaign for the vote. Women needed to be presented as different from men, as supplying a necessary feminine touch to politics, and this needed to be clearly exemplified in their physical appearance. However, this has left an unwanted legacy for contemporary women politicians.

A quantitative content analysis of UK newsprint coverage of proposed legislation to prohibit smoking in private vehicles carrying children.

BackgroundMass media representations of health issues influence public perceptions of those issues. Despite legislation prohibiting smoking in public spaces, second-hand smoke (SHS) remains a health risk in the United Kingdom (UK). Further legislation might further limit children’s exposure to SHS by prohibiting smoking in private vehicles carrying children. This research was designed to determine how UK national newspapers represented the debate around proposed legislation to prohibit smoking in private vehicles carrying children.MethodsQuantitative analysis of the manifest content of 422 articles about children and SHS published in UK and Scottish newspapers between 1st January 2003 and 16th February 2014. Researchers developed a coding frame incorporating emergent themes from the data. Each article was double-coded.ResultsThe frequency of relevant articles rose and fell in line with policy debate events. Children were frequently characterised as victims of SHS, and SHS was associated with various health risks. Articles discussing legislation targeting SHS in private vehicles carrying children presented supportive arguments significantly more frequently than unsupportive arguments.ConclusionsThe relatively positive representation of legislation prohibiting smoking in vehicles carrying children is favourable to policy advocates, and potentially indicative of likely public acceptance of legislation. Our findings support two lessons that public health advocates may consider: the utility of presenting children as a vulnerable target population, and the possibility of late surges in critical arguments preceding policy events.

Effectiveness of newspaper advertising for patient recruitment into a clinical trial.

To measure the impact of newspaper advertising across Scotland on patient interest, and subsequent recruitment into the Standard Care vs. Celecoxib Outcome Trial (SCOT), a clinical trial investigating the cardiovascular safety of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in patients with osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis. Newspaper advertisements about the SCOT trial were placed sequentially in regional and national Scottish newspapers. The number of phone calls as a result of exposure to the advertisements and ongoing study recruitment rates were recorded before, during and after the advertising campaign. To enroll in SCOT individuals had to be registered with a participating GP practice. The total cost for the advertising campaign was £46 250 and 320 phone calls were received as a result of individuals responding to the newspaper advertisements. One hundred and seventy-two individuals were identified as possibly suitable to be included in the study. However only 36 were registered at participating GP practices, 17 completed a screening visit and 15 finally were randomized into the study. The average cost per respondent individual was £144 and the average cost per randomized patient was £3083. Analysis of recruitment rate trends showed that there was no impact of the newspaper advertising campaign on increasing recruitment into SCOT. Advertisements placed in local and national newspapers were not an effective recruitment strategy for the SCOT trial. The advertisements attracted relatively small numbers of respondents, many of whom did not meet study inclusion criteria or were not registered at a participating GP practice.

News media representations of electronic cigarettes: an analysis of newspaper coverage in the UK and Scotland

ObjectiveElectronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) have recently been attracting interest for their potential as a less harmful alternative to smoking, their rising popularity and the regulatory issues they raise. The...

Fact, Truth, and the Limits of Sympathy: Newspaper Reporting of Suicide in the North of England, circa 1750-1830

In a recently completed study of suicide in England and Scotland, 1500-1850, I used all types of non-fictional documentation, including sermons, in order to give a textured understanding of how survivors handled its practical, spiritual, and ideological aftermath. These included coroners' inquests, financial account books, estate papers, legal texts, civil and criminal court records, and asylum case notes. Among these sources newspapers stood out as the most important mass medium that shaped changing representations of self-murder in the Georgian era. The accepted version of their role stems from Foucault, who proposed that eighteenth-century papers offered increasingly bland factual accounts of crime that were dry, unemotional, and lacking social depth: les silences de la chronique (Ambroise-Rendu; Foucault 59-69). They substituted a minimal amount of vicarious knowledge for direct and textured experience obtained through personal interchange. The leading historians of English suicide, Michael MacDonald and Terence Murphy, followed this line, while arguing that newspapers were instrumental in promoting a more matter-of-fact, secular, and sympathetic understanding of self-murder among their readerships: a modern medium promoting a modern message in MacDonald and Murphy's extended narrative of modernization, Sleepless Souls. Instead, I have followed the line so brilliantly set out by Kathleen Wilson in her study of the eighteenth-century provincial press: Newspapers were ... central instruments in the social production of information. Both representing and verifying local experience, they refracted ... events into socially meaningful categories and hierarchies of importance, bestowing order on the disordered and coordinating the imagination of social time and space. (40) My project is explicitly British, comparing northern English and Scottish newspapers from the early eighteenth century to the 1820s. Because of the remit of Beyond Depression, I discuss only the north of England in this article. In my study, I compare coverage of suicide in newspapers from contrasting parts of the north: the bustling commercial and industrial city of and the commercially important, but more rural and stable county of Cumberland and Westmorland. The Courant fulfilled the need for a paper with an early start (1711), steady publication, and regional readership in the northeast. The northwest did not have its own newspapers until relatively late, but the Cumberland Pacquet, or Ware's Whitehaven Advertiser, published consistently from 1774. I pored through a total of 7,681 numbers of the Courant and 2,620 copies of the Pacquet, starting from first publication and finishing in 1824, just after the law on the burial of English suicides was changed to prevent the notorious practices of staking and highway burial. Local and regional suicides can be found at the beginning or the end of the section of local news headed Newcastle or Whitehaven, which in the second half of the eighteenth century comprised about 15% of the two papers' four pages of three columns each. The few suicides lifted from London papers were usually in the main part of the paper on pages two or three. The question I asked of these newspapers was simple: how did they make suicide look? The first thing to notice about northern English newspapers is that suicide reporting was unusual until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Runs of months or even years during the eighteenth century are innocent of suicides: a finding that distances the north of England from MacDonald and Murphy's claim that references appeared several times a week in the southeastern papers they skimmed (303). It was not until the 1750s that suicide reporting was anything other than occasional in the Courant and not until the 1790s that it became a regular feature of local news for that paper. On average after 1800, local suicides appeared in one out of eight for each of the northern-English weekly papers. …

Evaluating newspaper performance in the public sphere: Press accounts of Westminster elections in Scotland and in England in the early post-devolution period

This article explores ways of evaluating the performance of the press in an electoral public sphere and compares the output of newspapers in England and in Scotland during the 2001 and 2005 general election campaigns. It combines content analysis with critical discussion of examples of coverage and complements these with evidence from interviews with Scottish political editors. It argues that, even though Scottish newspapers gave less coverage to the two elections than titles sold in England, both sets of newspapers performed better in their role as providers of information and opinion to inform the electorate, than in that of presenting an inclusive, discursive and diverse electoral debate or encouraging forms of active citizenry.

Review: Scottish Newspapers

Review: Scottish Newspapers

Looking for Work: The Black Presence in Britain 1860–1920

Focusing on the years between 1860 and 1920, this paper considers how newspaper archives can contribute to our knowledge of the livelihoods of working black men and women. Although the empirical material comes predominately from the classified advertisement pages of digitalised English newspapers, references to Irish, Welsh and Scottish newspapers are also made. The types of advertisements highlighted here form two main areas for discussion. Firstly, men and women advertising their availability to work in a wide range of domestic roles. Secondly, employers who were looking for black men and women to perform particular roles. The adverts are short, no more than a few lines, but they mark out spaces in the archives where black men and women become temporarily visible. The reasons why these men and women appear in these advertisements raise complex questions about race, identity and the ways in which racism may have impacted upon their ability to work.

The impact of recent Central and Eastern European migration on the Scottish health service: A study of newspaper coverage 2004–2008

This paper examines newspaper coverage of the impact on NHS Scotland of recent Central and Eastern European immigration. It follows rising public interest in the impacts of ‘record’ and ‘unexpected’ levels of migration after the 2004 and 2007 European Union (EU) enlargements. We reviewed reporting in six Scottish newspapers during 2004–2008 to track underlying themes within their coverage of EU migration. The framework of Social Representations Theory (SRT) was used to analyse how migration’s impact was conceptualised and explained.This research shows that portrayal of migrants posing a threat to the NHS (e.g. European staff with inadequate qualifications), has increased in frequency but changed in nature over the past 4 years. Meanwhile, reports have also portrayed themes of reassurance (e.g. NHS management control) to allay societies’ fears. The overall pattern is of representations of threat in the Scottish press being closely followed by those of reassurances. The most important reassurances relate to Scottish socioeconomic conditions, which raises questions might be seen in other UK newspapers as well as what will happen in Scotland if A8 migration decreases.

Headlining the head-butt: Zinedine Zidane/Marco Materazzi portrayals in prominent English, Irish and Scottish newspapers

Headlining the head-butt: Zinedine Zidane/Marco Materazzi portrayals in prominent English, Irish and Scottish newspapers