For many years, Britain’s tabloid press has nurtured Euroscepticism. Franco Zappettini (University of Liverpool) argues that during and since the EU referendum, this discourse has become explicitly populist, pitting ‘the people’ against their perceived enemies.
The role played by the British press – and in particular by the tabloids – in framing the debate both before and after the EU referendum needs more scrutiny. It is difficult to overstate the media’s ability to instigate public debates by setting the news agenda. While this can be a force for good when the ‘fourth estate’ performs its function of a democratic guardian in a pluralised public sphere, the media’s power can equally serve commercial logic and a newspaper’s own political and ideological agendas. So it is important to recognise that news is not simply circulated in and by the media, but that it can be actively framed through a newspaper’s ideological lens.
Brexit and the EU-UK relationship are a striking example of the role of the tabloids in constructing public perceptions. The British tabloid press has a long tradition of Eurosceptic and Europhobic editorial stances, including the promotion of various ‘crusades’ around different Euro-myths and infamous headlines such as the Sun’s ‘Up Yours Delors’. Overall, tabloids have been responsible for the trivialisation (some would call it ‘tabloidisation’) of European politics, a process that has led to the British written press being considered the least trusted in Europe. For years, titles such as the Daily Mail, the Sun and The Daily Express have been particularly active in portraying the UK as a victim of a Brussels ‘cosmopolitical’ conspiracy that, according to some stories, would result in the British Parliament being forced to ban traditional British kettles and lightbulbs, or British women being required to return old sex toys to comply with EU rules (the EU Commission’s myth-debunking website has a full list).
As most tabloids began their coverage of the Brexit campaign as prominent advocates of the Leave side (with the exception of the Labour-friendly Daily Mirror, the Mail on Sunday – which took the opposite stance to its daily sister publication – and the politically disengaged Daily Star) they could bank on having primed their audiences to effectively pre-legitimise Brexit. What we saw during the referendum campaign was a de facto consolidation of such populist discourses, as I argue in a paper that I recently presented at a LSE public event on populism. Here, I use the term populist (an otherwise much debated proposition between academics) in its basic meaning i.e. referring to the people. Of course, in most political discourses the term ‘people’ tends to be invariably invoked in semantically vague and rhetorical ways. But what makes a populist discourse different from a democratic one is that the former portrays the people in opposition to its imagined enemies and typically in exclusionary rather than inclusionary terms.
My study, based on a linguistic analysis of how the term ‘(the) people’ was used in a corpus of tabloids during the referendum campaign, suggests that the language of tabloids has been consistent with a populist view of the world in binary terms. Throughout the campaign, tabloids tended to portray the ‘British people’ (sometimes also qualified as ‘ordinary’ or ‘hard-working’ people) as a distinct group who were antagonised by other groups of ‘people’ who, in turn, were often characterised as either (EU) migrants and ‘free to move’ to the UK, or as ‘detached’ elites. The tabloid press further identified the latter as international (e.g. the EU, Brussels, Eurocrats, the International Monetary Fund, Barack Obama) or domestic (e.g. Westminster, ‘experts’ and Remainers) enemies of the ‘British people’.
These characterisations played a pivotal role in how tabloids were able to frame the debate over the Brexit referendum around typical populist dynamics. Notably, the coverage tapped into the politics of loss and resentment over migration, through arguments citing social pressure and resource sharing, but also about risk and security which, in some cases, lurched into explicit and xenophobic moral panic. For example, on 6 June 2016 the Daily Express reported Nigel Farage’s comment that mass sex attacks like those that had happened in Cologne would occur in the UK unless the country voted to leave.
Similarly, when pitting the ‘ordinary British people’ against the elites, the dominant dynamic in the corpus analysed was one of reaffirming a sense of national pride – akin to the defiant sovereignty that has characterised recent Euroscepticism across many democracies. The theme of standing up to the ‘bullying’ of the IMF, of Remainers David Cameron and George Osborne, or the EU’s ‘corrupt’ bureaucrats was common currency in many Daily Mail articles.
A key point worth making here is that tabloids did not simply act as communicative platforms by amplifying (or silencing) the main actors and arguments of the referendum campaign but, rather, they effectively (de)legitimised Brexit along a populist logic – as well as according to their own ideological agenda. Furthermore, this populist thrust was not limited to the Brexit campaign. As I have argued above, a large section of the British press has had a historical role in producing anti-EU propaganda based on spurious news and anti-foreign sentiment. Plenty of evidence suggests that this has not ceased with the referendum result but, in fact, that the populist thrust has steadily driven the post-referendum coverage of Brexit. Appeals to the ‘people’s will’ (and delegitimisation of supporters of softer or no Brexit as ‘enemies of the people’) have been key drivers of public and institutional discourses. As I argued in a talk given in Athens last summer, the longer-term coverage of European news in the tabloid press and the populist discursive articulation of Brexit have been instrumental in creating the chain of legitimation. It has institutionalised extreme Eurosceptic discourses that originally emerged on the fringe of the British political spectrum and now seem to be at the core of the implementation of Brexit.
Of course, the term ‘people’ has equally been appropriated by other actors to construct counter-discourses – for example around the ‘peoples’ vote’ referendum. At the moment, this seems to be the nodal point where the struggle over the Brexit debate is taking place.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Brexit blog, nor the LSE. It is based on ‘The tabloidization of the Brexit campaign: Power to the (British) people?’ presented at the public event ‘We, the people: Political, media and popular discourses of ‘us’ and ‘them’, held at the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics on 26-27 October 2018.
Dr Franco Zappettini is a Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on the textual/discursive analysis of different forms of political and organisational communication including mediated forms of populism, in particular tabloid populism and Euroscepticism in the British press. Franco tweets @frazapuk
In some ways it is even worse than that. “The people” have gradually been groomed. The referendum campaign started with the hostility to the EU built up over decades as described in this article but also with the claim that the benefits in trade and otherwise would be easily secured without tiresome regulations and without (exaggerated) financial contributions – known as “have cake and eat it” argument. The gradual grooming process brought us through admission that some (temporary) drawbacks would be possible until the current position whereby it is admitted that the disruption could be more severe but with the”Britain can take it” attitude which got us through the second world war we would eventually survive and prosper. If that situation had been spelled out in the first place a majority leave vote would have been unlikely to say the least.
My reply.
https://millwall-forum.vitalfootball.co.uk/threads/the-press-caused-brexit-nw.33424/
I agree with this comment piece, and the comment by Dennis above.
The “Leave” campaign has as much a secret campaign as the dreaded “Remain” campaign. Indeed the policies of the EU are clearly delineated on the web, if you take for example the official Europa website, one of the biggest websites in the world.
The real “Leave” objectives are more nebulous, apart from slogans like “Take Back Control”, “Control Immigration”, “End Brussels rule”, “Rein in the cosmopolitan elite”.
In this state of semi-ignorance the “red-top” newspapers (Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, The Sun). play a key role. They reduce all news to the level of celebrity TV, and, I have noticed, have practically zero coverage of events outside the United Kingdom. They explain why a country so advanced as the UK has been gradually softened up for the horrors of a “no deal” Brexit.
Populism is a response to a lack of democracy and control over one’s life, and as such has significant potential for people who can make a democratic case against the EU. Unfortunately pretty much everyone who disagrees with the Daily Mail / Express etc decided to defend technocratic government in the form of the EU, rail against a democratic vote and attempt to delegitimise it as the product of tabloid prejudice, racism, etc. I am not sure how defenders of the EU think this will convince Leave voters that they were wrong.
The author should note that spending in the referendum campaign was strongly biased to Remain, including a government leaflet sent to every household. Far from being in the ‘grip of Euroscepticism’, the government has Remain voters in charge of Brexit – people who did not want Brexit to happen at all and have often acted as though they still don’t.
There is no evidence of a ‘xenophobic moral panic’ amongst voters. The EU’s own polling indicates growing positivity to immigration both before and after the ref, and also less negativity than most other EU countries. UKIP were wiped out in the 2017 election. Compare than with other EU countries.
Democracy needs defending even if it does not go your way.
Populism is a word I never came across until it started being used to browbeat a certain vaguely identifiable section of electorates in nominally democratic western nation-states. Like so many words, they are invented or existing words that are either mis-applied or applied in a different way. Sofar, populism has been used to disparage that part of the electorate which, according to the Establishment, votes the wrong way. This word is used for the purpose of bullying, especially when people insist on voting wrong twice over for the same thing, or essentially the same thing, when a few cosmetic changes have been made as an excuse to make a certain electorate vote again on the same issue. There are many such words, phrases, concepts, narratives, etc. It is part of a political science which the Establishment will not allow to be scrutinised, the which, however, is nevertheless come out of the closet due to it being used overly much and in too obvious a manner. The moral of the story? We live in politically interesting times. Democracy is a living thing which people may avail themselves of or not as they choose or not choose; natural law in operation through human agency.
In future, it may become increasingly obvious that public votes are on the one hand not suitable for dealing with problems of certain complexity, and on the other hand are sensitive to manipulation through digital media campaigns, foreign influence, technical errors, etc.
The average outcome of a referendum will therefore soon be considered meaningless.
Digital mass media campaigns, social network manipulation, twitter bots, newspaper concentration, etc. may in the long run lead to a gradual replacement of democracy as the morally single most superior governance system.
Thus, the outcome of Brexit may soon be of less historic importance than the developments that have led to the initiation of the referendum in the first place.
In other words: the Brexit story seems to show many symptoms that might later be interpreted as a clear indication of a coming general crisis of global democracies in the early 21th century.
No matter if one likes the referendum outcome or not, it should certainly be no reason to celebrate the principles of democracy, because this is certainly not what the story of the referendum tells us.
Very one sided, the broadsheet press are equally populist towards their own readership.
Six months ago we were told that the UK had the worst growth rate in the G7. So how is the UK doing today? No one knows. Obviously it is no longer the worst because the media have dropped this issue. The Remainer press are equally selective and biased in their reporting.