Othering the European Union through constructing moral panics over ‘im/migrant(s)’ in the coverage of migration in three British newspapers, 2011–2016

Abstract

The article offers a corpus-driven computer-assisted analysis of newspaper language immediately surrounding 'im/migrant(s)' in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and the Sun and their Sunday publications between 2011 and 23 June 2016. Drawing on moral panic and social representations theories, the study reveals that the newspapers increasingly 'othered' the European Union (EU) through constructing moral panics over 'illegal'/'EU' 'im/migrant(s)' prior to the referendum, despite noticeable differences across them. It confirms that the EU was imagined as the origin and conduit of migrants entering the UK, especially by the two right-wing newspapers, constructing an antagonism between Britain and the EU, with implications for understanding the role of news media in shaping and signifying public discourses about Brexit. The conventional stigmatising norms labelling 'immigrants' have been adopted and extended to associate the object of the EU with the moral panics over 'immigrants', which reflects the changes in social representations of 'immigrants' and 'the EU'.

COVID-19 in Romania: transnational labour, geopolitics, and the Roma ‘outsiders’

“…Since EU enlargement, labor migrants from new accession countries have been frequently presented in terms of threats to both the economy (through "taking" jobs from local workers) and the welfare system of the destination countries (Hellwig and Sinno 2017;Eberl et al 2018). In particular, some mainstream media coverage has focused on stereotyping and denigrating EU migrant workers, emphasizing issues of criminal behavior and delinquency (ibid; Rasinger 2010;Dursun-Ozkanca 2011;Fox, Moroşanu, and Szilassy 2012;Tong and Zuo 2018). Such representations are contemporary forms of a long-standing process: the ongoing imagining of the east of Europe as "other" (Kuus 2004;Light and Young 2009;Ibrahim and Howarth 2016).…”

News media representation on EU immigration before Brexit: the ‘Euro-Ripper’ case

“…Yet, the discussion of how immigration influenced (or not) the Brexit vote remains very uncertain. However, as expected, journalists show a greater interest in describing acts of violence committed by people that move around, whose mobility tend to be perceived as a contemporary security problem (see Curtice, 2017;Tong and Zuo, 2019;Walter, 2019).…”

Brexit, Europe and othering

“…Of course, others may exist within as well as outside a nation and there is considerable evidence of the ways in which internal minorities have been othered. Some groups of people may be seen as a threat to societal values and interests and a 'moral panic' emergesan act of othering through a process of labelling and defining the others as deviant (Tong & Zuo, 2018). Minorities who have been othered in this way may include foreign nationals, religious or ethnic minorities, refugees or homosexuals.…”

“…However, it is argued here that a crucial element within that explanation lies in the concept of othering and the belief that 'Europe'and European migrants to the UK in particularrepresented an 'other' which was somehow alien to the UK, its history, culture and values. Othering refers to the process of labelling and defining those who we perceive to be in a different group as somehow 'deviant' (Tong & Zuo, 2018) and this process underlies many modern violent, but also non-violent, conflicts. The purpose of this article is to further understand how the concept of othering relates to the 2016 Brexit result and how it might help to explain it.…”