Nation Speaking Unto Nation? Newspapers and National Identity in the Devolved UK

Abstract

There are two problems with the existing account of the relationship between newspapers and national identity in the UK. The first is that although it is widely assumed that the mass media are central to the reproduction and evolution of national identity this has never been empirically demonstrated. The second is that exactly what comprises the relevant 'national' context in the UK is unclear. Content analysis of 2,500 sampled articles, together with qualitative comparison of different editions of the same newspaper titles and interviews with editors and journalists are used to show the extent and nature of 'national' frames of reference in newspapers in England and Scotland. Paradoxically, devolution may have reduced the spatial diversity of news stories in the press in England and Scotland.

Contrasting Representations of Englishness During FIFA World Cup Finals

“…[20] Although they broadly agree with Billig"s contentions, Rosie et al argue that it has often only been assumed that the mass media are central to the reproduction and evolution of national identity, rarely has this been empirically demonstrated. [21] The current study seeks to provide such empirical evidence in relation to media representations of English national identity. Findings have been divided into two broad sections that demonstrate the two main ways in which English national identity has been represented by the British national press in their coverage of the England team during World Cup Finals tournaments.…”

News, Nationalism, and the Imagined Community

“…But his emphasis, as evidenced by studies that have applied Billig's theory (e.g., Bishop and Jaworski, 2003;Law, 2001;Rosie et al, 2004;Yumul and Ö zkirimli, 2000), is on the content rather than the content-makers, who are the focus of this study. Anderson's perspective, too, is not a perfect fit: his theorizing was fashioned primarily for understanding imagined political communities (1983, p. 15); and with regard to news media, he focused on the communion being imagined in the minds of readers, not journalists.…”

“…Mass media discourse, with its (re)production of ideologies in social life and its deictic delineation of Us versus Them, makes natural and unproblematic ''our'' place and purpose within the world of nations*the very essence of nationalism (Billig, 1995;Bishop and Jaworski, 2003). This discursive construction of national identity has been the focus of a wealth of scholarship on the news media's role in shaping thought about ''the nation'' (e.g., Bishop and Jaworski, 2003;Brookes, 1999;Law, 2001;Rosie et al, 2004;Yumul and Ö zkirimli, 2000). While many of the aforementioned studies were critical discourse analyses*as opposed to the present study, which focuses far less on content*they are important here because they reinforce the relationship between media and the construction of identity.…”

“…'' This sub-state nationalism in Spain (Beck, 2006;Guibernau, 2000;Muro and Quiroga, 2005) and the momentum it provides for bilingual journalism present a ripe case for which to study the mass media's role in the construction of national identity. The relationship between news and nationhood has long been fertile ground for communications research (e.g., Billig, 1995;Bishop and Jaworski, 2003;Brookes, 1999;Law, 2001;Rosie et al, 2004;Schlesinger, 1991;Yumul and Ö zkirimli, 2000), and the field has grown in recent decades as new theories on ''the nation'' have emerged (cf. Law, 2001).…”

Television news, narrative conventions and national imagination

“…Inspired by Billig's work, several more recent studies have looked at the largely unnoticed conventions of representation that support the reproduction of nationalism in contemporary forms of newspaper news, including the use of deictic expressions, frequent references to 'the nation', and the division of news into domestic and foreign (e.g. Yumul and Özkırımlı 2000;Law 2001;Rosie et al 2004). Although these studies do not explicitly focus on narrative conventions, the characteristics of newspaper reporting they explore can be regarded as attributes of narrative structure.…”