The tabloidization of the Brexit campaign
Power to the (British) people?
Franco Zappettini | University of Liverpool
Consistent with a populist script, evoking the people has been a nodal point in the discursive unfolding of Brexit and its
legitimation. This paper focuses on the mediatization of the Brexit referendum campaign in a corpus of online British tabloids to address
the critical question of how the people in whose name Brexit was (de)legitimised were discursively constructed and mobilized. The argument
put forward is that the legitimation of Brexit was achieved through exclusionary definitions of the people and through strategies of fear,
resentment and empowerment. This discursive framing points to the wider question of the instrumental role that a large section of the
British tabloid press has had not simply in the contingency of referendum but also in the longer-term legitimation chain of Brexit and in
its institutionalization and more generally in the historical priming of their readership with negative coverage of the UK/EU
relationship.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Tabloid Populism: ‘the people’ and/in the media
- 3.The tabloidization of Euronews and the framing of the Brexit campaign in the British tabloid press
- 4.Methodology and data
- 5.Results
- 5.1Corpus Linguistics Analysis: Main collocates of (the) people
- 5.2Discursive Pragmatic Analysis
- 5.2.1Antagonistic representations of ‘the British people’ vs. ‘immigrants’
- 5.2.2Antagonistic representations of ‘the British people’ vs. the establishment/elites
- 5.2.3Antagonistic representations of ordinary/working people’s interests
- 6.Conclusions
- Notes
-
References
Published online: 10 November 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.19103.zap
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.19103.zap
References
Aalberg, Toril, Frank Esser, Carsten Reinemann, Jesper Strömbäck, and Claes H. de Vreese
Arditi, Benjamin
Anderson, Peter. J. and Tony Weymouth
Bennett, Samuel
Berry, Mike
Bingham, Adrian and Martin Conboy
Bos, Linda and Kees Brants
Bruggemann, Michael
Buckledee, Steve
Carey, Sean and Burton, Jonathan
Conboy, Martin
Daddow, Oliver
De Cleen, Benjamin and Yannis Stavrakakis
Entman, Robert M.
Esser, Frank, and Jesper Strömbäck
European Broadcasting Unit
2017 Trust in Media Report. Available from https://www.ebu.ch/publications/trust-in-media-2017
Freeden, Michael
Gamson, William, and Andre Modigliani
Hameleers, Michael, Bos, Linda and Claes H. de Vreese
Jagers, Jan and Stefaan Walgrave
Krämer, Benjamin
Krämer, Benjamin
Krzyżanowski, Michał
Krzyżanowski, Michał, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Ruth Wodak
Levy, David A. L., Billur Aslan and Diego Bironzo
Mazzoleni, Gianpietro
McCombs, Maxwell E.
McNeil, Robert and Eric Karstens
2018 Comparative report on cross-country media practices, migration, and mobility. European Journalism Centre. University of Oxford. Available from https://www.reminder-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Final-September-2018_with-cover.pdf
Mény, Yves and Yves Surel
Moffitt, Benjamin and Simon Tormey
Moore, Martin and Gordon Ramsay
Mudde, Cas and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser
OFCOM
2017 News consumption in the UK:2016. Published 27 June 2017. Available from https://www.ofcom.org.uk/data/assets/pdf_file/0016/103570/news-consumption-uk-2016.pdf
Partington, Alan, Duguid, Alison and Charlotte Taylor
Reyes, Antonio
Richardson, John. E.
Scheufele, Dietram
Schreiber, Mia and Zohar Kampf
Stavrakakis, Yannis
Van Leeuwen, Theo
Wirz, Dominique S., Martin Wettstein, Anne Schulz, Philipp Müller, Christian Schemer, Nicole Ernst, Frank Esser, and Werner Wirth
Wodak, Ruth
Wodak, Ruth and Krzyżanowski, Michał
Zappettini, Franco
2021 Taking the left way out of Europe. The role of Lexit in Labour’s ambivalent stance on European (dis)integration. Special issue on ‘Reimagining Europe and its (dis)integration? (De)legitimising the EU’s project at times of crisis’ (eds) Franco Zappettini and Samuel Bennett. Journal of Language and Politics, 20:1.
Zappettini, Franco and Michał Krzyżanowski, M.