Are You What You Read? Predicting Implicit Attitudes to Immigration Based on Linguistic Distributional Cues From Newspaper Readership; A Pre-registered Study

The implicit association test (IAT) measures bias towards often controversial topics (e.g., race, religion), while newspapers typically take strong positive/negative stances on such issues. In a pre-registered study, we developed and administered an immigration IAT to readers of the Daily Mail (a typically anti-immigration publication) and the Guardian (a typically pro-immigration publication) newspapers. IAT materials were constructed based on co-occurrence frequencies from each newspapers' website for immigration-related terms (migrant/immigrant) and positive/negative attributes (skilled/unskilled). Target stimuli showed stronger negative associations with immigration concepts in the Daily Mail compared to the Guardian, and stronger positive associations in the Guardian corpus compared to the Daily Mail corpus. Consistent with these linguistic distributional differences, Daily Mail readers exhibited a larger IAT bias, revealing stronger negative associations to immigration concepts compared to Guardian readers. This difference in overall bias was not fully explained by other variables, and raises the possibility that exposure to biased language contributes to biased implicit attitudes

What lies beneath: exploring links between asylum policy and hate crime in the UK

This paper explores the link between increasing incidents of hate crime and the asylum policy of successive British governments with its central emphasis on deterrence. The constant problematisation of asylum seekers in the media and political discourse ensures that 'anti-immigrant' prejudice becomes mainstr earned as a common-sense response. The victims are not only the asylum seekers hoping for a better life but democratic society itself with its inherent values of pluralism and tolerance debased and destabilised

Why the Media Matters: A Postfunctionalist Analysis of European Integration and National Identity in Public Discourse

This study contributes to the growing literature on the politicisation of European integration in EU member states, and the United Kingdom in particular. Existing studies have shown that political identities are closely related to the levels of support held by citizens for European integration, and that citizen opposition to the EU is mobilised by political parties who activate the tension between identity and jurisdictional reforms. This study argues that existing theories of integration do not adequately acknowledge the role of the media in national debates about European integration, in light of the media’s role as the main source of information on the EU for citizens. It builds upon Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks’ (2009) postfunctionalist theory of European integration, to examine the process by which European integration is politicised in member states, and argues that the media should be theorised as a substantive actor in this process. It presents a new model – Media Augmented Postfunctionalism – that conceptualises the politicisation process and the role of the mass media within it. A discourse analysis of nine UK national daily newspapers and of political party discourses is deployed alongside a quantitative analysis of media positions to explore the linkages between the press, party discourses, and public opinion in the UK between 1997 and 2010. The thesis presents evidence to suggest that the structure of newspaper positions on European integration is similar to that of parties. It goes on to explore the content and character of newspaper discourses, and shows that there is a strong association between the position of newspapers on the ‘new politics’ dimension and their discursive construction of the EU: those newspapers that have a strongly traditional-authoritarian- nationalist position are more likely to oppose European integration. It demonstrates that while there is a strong and cohesive anti-European discourse in the UK press, there is not a corresponding coherent pro-European discourse. This thesis finally shows that newspapers play an important role in mediating party discourses and that they substantively (re-)frame public debates on European integration, determining their character. These findings suggest that the mass media can alter the outcomes of the politicisation and contestation of the EU in member states

The MIGRATION AS AN INVASION and THE COMMON EUROPEAN HOUSE Metaphors in media discourse

The article discusses figurative use of expressions from the domains of INVASION and HOUSE in media discourse on the European migrant crisis. The conceptual metaphors MI-GRATION AS AN INVASION and the COMMON EUROPEAN HOUSE, which are inextricably relat-ed in the segments of the real discourse on migration, have strong rhetorical power and serve as a means of promoting antimigrant ideologies. The aim of this paper is to identify the instances of deliberate use of the aforementioned metaphors in British and Bosnian-Herzegovinian papers and describe their use in the media with the aim of changing address-ees’ perspectives on an important issue such as migration

A Tale of Donkeys, Swans and Racism: London Tabloids, Scottish Independence and Refugees

This article explores the nature of immigration and refugee narratives and how they are structured by a constellation of media interests in the specific context of Scottish news agenda. It also looks at the coverage of asylum issues by The Scottish Sun, The Scottish Daily Mail and The Scottish Daily Express between September 2003 and September 2004 as examples of media interventions. This comparative analysis identifies these interventions as distinctive and orchestrated racist efforts that use elements such as culture and national security to legitimize it narratives. It studies the amount of coverage and looks at specific examples in terms of narratives and textual analysis

THE EUROPEAN UNION REFERENDUM CAMPAIGN: IDEOLOGIES AND MANIPULATIVE FEATURES IN THE BRITISH PRESS DISCOURSE

Undeniably, Media plays a pivotal role in every aspect of peoples' daily lives and significantly during times of great events. For decades, Media generally and the press particularly have been harnessed by politicians and commentators to impart their messages to the general public to either control or legitimize their political attitudes and goals. The rise of online news and the systematic decline of newspaper circulation did not herald the end of the significance of the press to political debate. People's actions and opinions are deeply amenable and manipulated by the hidden ideologies adopted by the online press and embedded within the news texts. During the referendum campaign of 2016, the press was a primary source of political information and had a significant position in setting the agenda for the mainstream Media (Levy et al., 2016). This paper examines critically the way the online press has manipulated people's views in the referendum campaign of 2016 on the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union. It focuses mainly on the micro-level of study to unveil the implicit ideologies which the newspaper discourse is laden with. Norman Fairclough's model of CDA is the appropriate approach for this study that is to analyze the linguistic characteristics of vocabulary and grammar which reflect power relations and the ideological persuasion in discourse (Fairclough, 2001, p.91). The result reveals the use of experiential, expressive, and relational values by both campaigners meant to influence and direct the individual’s vote on the day of the referendum

Representation, immigration, experience and memory: a study of representational dynamics of “the other” in post imperial Britain (1947-1990s) with special reference to African and African Caribbean immigrants

MA by Research Dissertation Submitted in accordance with requirements for the degree of MA Media StudiesThe study is an assessment of the proposition that the British media coverage of African and African Caribbean minority ethnic communities is permeated with 'othering'. It analysed the mode of accounting and explaining mobilised by some of the national press regarding racial unrest, focusing particularly on those major events that served to narrativise and recompose the image of immigrants as the 'other' in the context of articulating Britishness. These are Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech in 1968 and the Brixton disturbance of 1981. A content/frame analysis of newspaper coverage of these events was carried out. Seymore-Ure's analysis of the media's response to Powell's speech in The Political Impact of Mass Media (1974) served as major point of reference. In addition, the study explored through in-dept interviews the relationship between lived experiences and popular media discourses in an attempt to gauge the extent to which interviewees' memories cohered or not with the media's account of events involving black people; and which news stories have had significant and formative impact on the experiences of other-ness

Constructing cultural borders: Depictions of Muslim refugees in British and German media

The recent migration of refugees from Muslim majority countries to Central Europe has prompted an almost unprecedented dynamic in the British and German public sphere and political culture. However, there exists a lack of understanding how the “refugee crisis” and Islam are linked to each other in public discourse. This paper addresses this lacuna by seeking to answer the question how the current refugee situation has been interpreted with regards to Islam in British and German newspapers. A critical analysis allows to identify three major discursive patterns that contribute to the securitisation of the refugee situation. Moreover, the study reveals the construction of Muslim refugees as the culturally inferior “other” to an exclusive “European Christian Culture”