The role of news values in the discur-sive construction of the brexit referendum in the uk press

Resum

The main aim of this study is to explore the news discourse of the Brexit referendum campaign from a corpus assisted discourse studies (CADS) perspective. More specifically, I analyse how different topics and debates related to Brexit were discursively constructed in the British quality press coverage of the referendum campaign. Furthermore, I also investigate the ideological differences in the discursive construction of the aforementioned coverage along political affiliations (left-right) and ideological stances toward Brexit (Leave-Remain). To do so, a corpus of four major British broadsheets (The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and Daily Telegraph) was collected using Nexis UK news databases. The search word used for data retrieval was Brexit. The results were down-sampled by limiting search timespan [22 February to 23 June 2016], news type [articles], and managing duplicities (i.e., articles repeated in digital and paper editions). The corpus was analysed using a combination of corpus linguistics tools for quantitative analysis and the Discourse of News values Analysis (Bednarek and Caple, 2017) for qualitative analysis. Thus, the methodological design followed Baker et al.’s (2008) model of corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Using cluster analysis, the most frequent words of the corpus were extracted, and five major areas of discussion, namely, Brexit, Economy, Immigration, UK vs EU, and People and Public, were identified. Next, concordance analyses were performed for each word in the four sub-corpora, and the news values employed in each field were coded and their frequency computed. Then, normalised distributions of the relative frequency of news values were calculated accordingly, in each area for all the four outlets. In addition, a number of selected excerpts (62 pieces) were selected for further in-depth qualitative analysis of how news values were used to discursively construct Brexit and other related topics in the campaign coverage. The study results showed that, in general, the stance toward Brexit had a more explanatory value than the traditional left-right divide in how different news values were used across the corpus. In addition, in many cases, different news values were used together to construct certain narratives and discourses in line with the outlets’ stance toward Brexit. The data suggest certain news values were used hierarchically and synergistically, with important discursive and ideological implications. From the analysed data it can be concluded that the pro-Remain newspapers, in general, tended to construct a negative discourse about the consequences of Brexit by combining the news value of Negativity with Impact, Eliteness, Superlativeness and Proximity. On the other hand, the pro-Leave newspaper tried to downgrade such negative outcomes of a possible Brexit by systematically separating Negativity from other news values, thus devaluing and minimizing their potential impact. In other cases, the pro-Leave newspaper combined Positivity with Impact and Eliteness to enhance and elaborate some specific representations in its discourse. In general, the use of news values in the discursive construction of Brexit and its related semantic fields analysed in this dissertation can be considered as a discursive practice highly charged with social, ideological, and political considerations.