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.

Journalistic clichés under the conceptual “umbrella” of isotopies: “linguistic pathologies in vogue” or “mirror-words” of psychosocial reality?

The present paper examines the dominant isotopies under which linguistic clichés emerge in the context of the intense media coverage of the current COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis of the linguistic automatisms excerpted from the online journalistic discourse proved to be prolific in identifying additional features of the linguistic “behaviour” of clichés. Furthermore, the investigation facilitated our understanding of the underlying motivations, implications, and potential effects triggered by the use of specific prefabricated structures. As a general remark, the analysis of these dominant overused schemes revealed how media institutions overuse, under the pressure of the international model, specific lexico-semantic isotopies which exploit prefabricated structures from distinct fields: war, particularly the area of pyrotechnic elements (“explosion of new cases”, “huge explosion of Covid cases”), the semantic area of natural disasters subsumed to liquidity (“a new wave of COVID”, “anti-Covid control wave”, “death wave”, “a wave of hateful comments”, “wave of infections/confirmations/illnesses”, “flood of accusations/fines”, “tsunami of COVID-19 patients/displacements”). We have also identified journalistic automatisms circumscribed to the isotopy of the economy (“epidemiological balance”), ranking and sports competition (statistical clichés: “top of infections”, “Covid top”, “top Covid infections”, “European top of Covid evolution”, “vaccine race”, among others), disaster (clichés of melodramatic excess, salient to tabloid journalism: “disaster”, “chaos”, “nightmare”, “COVID-19 drama”). For the present article, we channeled our investigative effort only towards the first two dominant isotopies. To achieve these objectives, we proposed a two-dimensional research model. Specifically, we correlated the data obtained through conjugating linguistic micro-parameters (semantic, stylistic features, lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns) and macrolevel variables (pragmatic, psycholinguistic aspects, perspectives derived from the sociology of media communication, critical analysis of discourse, among others). The investigation results revealed that these linguistic patterns, analyzed under the conceptual “umbrella” of isotopy, can function as rhetorical and lexico-semantic strategies through which journalists activate the receptors’ affective responses. Consequently, media discourse can trigger and maintain artificial states of anxiety, panic, and restlessness. Over time, this journalistic operation leads, through the impact of obsessive repetition, to the passive consumption of media representations and cultural stereotypes, of preconceived ideas.

The Tabloid Press: Tales of Controversy, Community and Public Life

This chapter chronicles the development of tabloid newspapers in Britain and Northern Ireland across the 20th and early 21st centuries. It investigates the spectacular rise and subsequent demise of the popular tabloid as a distinct newspaper form, which has stirred as much controversy as it has shaped public debate. How did tabloid newspapers come to attract such vast readerships? What basis for the formation of public opinion did they provide, and how did they impact on the wider journalistic climate? The chapter explores tabloid history from three interrelated thematic points of departure. Firstly, it pays attention to a notable history of controversy, characterised by the papers’ tendency to push ethical and taste boundaries, and by the introduction of new, sensationalist, journalistic styles and content orientations. From a different perspective, however, the history of tabloid journalism can be regarded as one of building notions of community through, for instance, the provision of an inclusive address to readers, and the interlinking of news with other forms of popular culture. Finally, the chapter considers the historical, highly complex, role of tabloid journalism within public life, as a basis for the formation of public opinion, and as a political force.

Tabloid Journalism and Tabloidization

Tabloid journalism has long been a highly contested news form. With a sensationalist approach and an easily digested mix of entertainment and news, it has often attracted mass audiences at the same time as it has stirred controversy and raised concern about its impact on public discourse. Originating in the tabloid newspaper, associated both with a small newspaper format and a particular news style, the term “tabloid” is today considered to characterize a range of other media content, extending to popular TV programs and certain kinds of online news. The rise and development of tabloid journalism, in combination with wider processes shaping the media, has moreover led to a debate about “tabloidization,” involving ideas about shifting priorities in journalism and the media landscape as a whole. Although tabloidization has no standard definition, an overview of empirical research using the concept as a starting point highlights analyses of various media, historical periods, and media markets, adding to understandings of tabloidization as multi-faceted and context-bound. Such a process, furthermore, has been viewed both as a possible threat to the public sphere and as potentially entailing democratizing elements, relating to long-standing depictions of tabloid journalism as either “dumbing down” or “reaching out.” Yet contemporary analysis in this field has tended to paint a more complex picture of both phenomena as well as pointing to emerging questions around the category of tabloid journalism in digital settings.