Near and far: banal national identity and the press in Scotland

Abstract

Too often study of communicative and cultural processes makes `gratuitous assumptions' about media and collective identities like national identity. This article is a critical engagement with Michael Billig's notion of `banal nationalism', a rare analysis of everyday media rhetoric and nationalism. It does this through a survey of daily newspapers sold in Scotland. Newspapers are plotted according to an index of semantic assumptions they make about where the spatial centre of national communication lies. The newspapers surveyed cluster into three broad national types, ranging from an indigenous Scottish press, Scottish editions of English-based papers, `tabloid interlopers' and the English-based broadsheets. The article argues that Billig's emphasis on the `big state' nationalism of the USA and the UK restricts the analytical scope of `banal nationalism' when studying newspaper rhetoric in a `stateless nation' like Scotland.

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).…”

“…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). One of the most significant of these theories is Anderson's (1983) conception of the ''imagined community.''…”

Australian press constructions of the 2002 Bali bombing: differing imaginings of the nation and its place in the world

“…Billig valuably explains the discursive familiarity of such assumptions though his stress on "banal nationalism", by which he refers to politicians" use of the national "we" and "our", newspapers" separating off "foreign" from "home" news, even the use of the definite article before "country" in weather reports -or at a slightly more "flag-waving" level, barracking for one"s national team in international sports events (1995: 100, 107, 117-8;Law 2001). What discourses of the national also routinely naturalise is the state.…”