Discursive Construction of Immigration Through the Lens of News Values in the Brexit Referendum

This paper aims to analyse how immigration was discursively constructed as a newsworthy topic in the UK’s quality papers’ campaign coverage of the Brexit referendum. To do so, a corpus of four major British broadsheets (The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and Daily Telegraph) was collected and...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Javadinejad, Arash
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir
Repositorio:RIUCV. Repositorio de la Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riucv.ucv.es:20.500.12466/4495
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12466/4495
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Brexit
Immigration
Corpus linguistics
Discursive News Values Analysis
5308 Economía General
Descripción
Sumario:This paper aims to analyse how immigration was discursively constructed as a newsworthy topic in the UK’s quality papers’ campaign coverage of the Brexit referendum. To do so, a corpus of four major British broadsheets (The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and Daily Telegraph) was collected and analysed with a combination of qualitative (Discursive News Values Analysis) and quantitative (Corpus Linguistics) methods. The results show that similar patterns of news values usage appeared in the corpus across the ideological lines (left-right) and Brexit stance (Leave- Remain). Although some dissociation strategies can be observed in the left-wing or Remain backing press, the statistically significant presence of similar linguistic pointers indicates that an anti-immigrant discourse was a salient part of the coverage, even permeating into the left-wing press and the Remain camp’s discourse. The adoption and repetition of such narratives could also, by themselves, lead to further acceptance and normalisation of the common anti-immigrant topoi in the broader discourse of Brexit in society, although more research is needed in this regard.