British media

This book provides a much-needed analysis of the changing representation of gay politicians in UK newspapers. Focusing on the 1950s onwards, a time when the press became more personal and gay politicians/politicians involved in gay scandals came to the forefront of media attention, the text uses case studies and socio-political analysis to develop a frame of representation which shows how a move from intolerance to tolerance to partial recognition of homosexuality has impacted upon the acceptability of homosexuality in 'heterosexual public space', with this then affecting the representation of gay politicians in the press. What was private has now become public, pointing to the fact that gay politicians have mediated personas; their private lives, and sexualities, are lived in/presented through the media.

The book reveals insights about representation and the construction of identity through its focus on sexuality, politicians and the media, with the changing line between the private and public an essential concept. Sensationalism and scandal are key issues in the text, with the press coverage of politicians caught up in gay scandals, as well as gay politicians, explored.

The representation of gay politicians in the UK press has so far been underrepresented in media and political studies. Lack of discussion is strange, considering that gay politicians have been at the forefront of the media’s attention over the last fifty years. "Sex, Lies and Politics" provides a much needed contribution to political, media and social history.

The paper suggest looking into the portrayals of India and Ukraine in Russia and the UK in the context of postcolonial theory based on Edward Said's conceptualisation of orientalism as discourse. The results of the research which was carried out on the holistic basis of both quantitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis emphasize interesting similarities and dissimilarities in the functioning of orientalist discourses in the media of formerly imperial states.

Political discourse is an integral part of cross-cultural communication, a way of interaction between political elites and the population. Various means of stylistic devices of expressiveness are used by many politicians today to have the most significant impact on the audience. According to the research work, ways of intellectual influence are often used in the media, and one of them is an idiom. The author's stress and the variety of idiomatic foundations in modern English are rich and diverse in their representation types. The relevance of the research work is determined by the fact that understanding the meaning of idiomatic units is extremely important in the communication process to determine the semantic load and political orientation of a text or speech. The article deals with the analysis of idioms functioning in the political discourse reflecting characteristic cultural features based on British and American political texts. The authors stress the importance of linguistic and cultural cooperation while process interpretation. According to work, the analysis of idioms meaning in public speeches of famous British and American politicians is a challenging task considering the difference in language and cultural perception of different cultures: British and American. One must mention, to avoid misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication, it is necessary to know the various aspects' ground of such a language phenomenon as an idiomatic unit. The research work aims to study the variability of English and American idioms based on political texts and give their Russian equivalents if possible.

A look at the representation of the female gender in the media and its effect. This essay concentrates on the British TV show "Drifters". A female driven production that identifies itself with crudeness and has subsequently been blamed as "damaging" and "un-feminist".

The aim of this research is to analyze how Turkey is portrayed by the British
media. This study uses discourse analysis to examine Turkey’s portrayal in
two British daily newspapers, namely the Guardian and Daily Telegraph, and
takes a detailed look at news items published between September 2004 and
December 2005. The portrayal of Turkey in the western media helps us
comprehend the stereotypes and images at work in the types of cognition
European countries have about Turkey. Understanding this portrayal
contributes to the development of new projects, strategies and tactics to remove
negative images and mental obstacles in the minds of Europeans who remain
less than enthusiastic about accepting Turkey’s inclusion in the European
Union. The deeply rooted conceptions and historical concerns held by European
societies regarding Turkey – a country which has been trying to join the EU
since 1963 – will be the main emphasis of our examination in this paper.

In 1992 RTÉ lost an important High Court case which determined that the station had extended censorship provisions under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act. A Ministerial Order in place under the act, as amended in 1976, censored spokespersons for, or representatives of, Sinn Féin on RTE .

In 'Laurence [Larry] O'Toole versus RTÉ', O'Toole argued successfully that RTÉ was wrong to censor him as spokesperson for striking bakery workers, solely because he was a Sinn Féin member. RTÉ had in effect extended the censorship provision by banning all Sinn Féin members, whether speaking for trade unions, as in O'Toole's case, other organisations, or in a private capacity.

O'Toole established his argument in letters back and forth to RTÉ Director of News Joe Mulholland in 1990 and 1991. He stated that as a worker in the Gateaux factory in Finglas (where the strike took place) and as an executive member of the bakery workers trade union, he was not representing or speaking on behalf of Sinn Féin. RTÉ rejected his argument and stated that O'Toole was banned because he was a Sinn Féin member (two of the letters are attached).

When the High Court verdict was announced, RTÉ was in effect ordered to liberalise its censorship regime. Many expected that the station would be relieved to permit more freedom of speech. The NUJ Broadcasting Branch in RTÉ welcomed the ruling and it was thought management would follow suit. Surprisingly, RTE management did not and justified its stance to staff in an internal bulletin. The Repeal Section 31 Campaign replied with its own RTÉ staff bulletin. The two bulletins are available here, alongside campaign leaflets produced before and after the High Court judgement.

The article applies Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism to the research of the media portrayals of Ukraine and India in the Russian newspapers Trud and Izvestiya and Britain’s The Times and The Sun. The research based mainly on quantitative content analysis locates differences and similarities in the ways media deal with formerly dependent countries. Their portrayals are found out to be characterized by postcolonial condition significantly, and in Russia more so than in the UK.

Politics of force today is inseparably connected with politics of images. This paper focuses on the representation of the image of Russia in the British political mass media discourse of 2013-2017. Taking into account K. Boulding's definition of the image of state as a special concept, the paper claims that this concept includes the notion or nuclear, verbalized with the lexeme 'Russia' and its substitutes, and different associations, connected with this notion and thus forming: metaphorical, evaluative and ethnocultural associative layers of the concept. Drawing on the scientific works on problems of mass media discourse, image-formation, associations, structure and verbalization of concepts and using the methods of contextual, critical discourse, seme and conceptual metaphor analysis, the paper reveals the range of means for surfacing the nucleus and layers of the concept 'Russia, used by British journalists. These means demonstrate ideological values of the discourse in question and stereotypes, which it forms in the minds of British people. The paper suggests that the scheme of analysis of the image of state in the political mass media discourse, offered in it, can be applied to the investigation of images of other states as well as to comparative studies.

These have been bruising times for those who work in the newspaper industry – and, more specifically, for those who have been forced out.
And there are many of them.
This study’s principal author François Nel of the University of Central Lancashire estimates that the UK’s mainstream journalism corps has shrunk between a quarter and a third over the past decade (and 30% to 40% on the 2001 estimates widely used by the industry).
Here we highlight the experiences of a fraction of those – 144 – who responded to an online questionnaire conducted in collaboration with Journalism.co.uk. 
The stories are sobering. “I worry about money and I worry about direction – where I’m going, what I’m doing, who I am now,” wrote a 46-year-old former section editor who was chosen to take a redundancy package in April 2009 along with “a third of the staff” in her office.  Her concerns about finding, not only a new income, but also a new identity, echo those of many respondents.
Asked what it is like knowing that their careers in traditional newspaper journalism might be finished, many respondents found it difficult to maintain a characteristic stiff upper lip.
“Gutted,” said a 46-year-old male photographer who has a GCSE qualification, 19 years of experience in regional papers and dependent children living at home. 
“I feel sh** after reading that question,” said a 28-year-old former assistant magazine editor with a postgraduate degree. “And wish I had never even tried to get into this bloody profession.”
Some respondents saw it as an opportunity. “I know I could go back. But I don’t want to,” said a 32-old-old former sub-editor for a national weekly newspaper. “I want to find a way of earning money for myself with my talents so I can leave London and start a family with my husband. My priorities have changed.”
Whatever their experiences, whatever their prospects, most agreed on this: it had been a road worth travelling. When asked if they would do it all again, nearly 70% said they would still have chosen journalism as a career - even if they had known what would happen to the industry.
While the findings cannot be generalised, we believe they should not be ignored.
These voices can help inform media managers, union officials, policy makers, training bodies, educators, would-be journalists, those still working and, perhaps most  importantly, the thousands of other journalists who have left - or have been forced out  - of the profession.
We welcome your comments, questions and suggestions on this exploratory study. And, in particular, your views on what we should learn from – and do with – this information.
Please post your thoughts on Journalism.co.uk , or send them directly to the study author François Nel at FPNel@uclan.ac.uk, or on Twitter to @francoisnel using the hashtag #laidoff.

This book compares British and Spanish media covering the French ban on hijab-wearing in public schools. Using interdisciplinary approaches ranging from social psychology, semiology, cognitive linguistics, and sociology, it explains how the hijab is interpreted as a sign by the mainstream culture and hijab-wearing Muslim sub-culture.

Based on an analysis of 108 articles published in the national newspaper from each context, this comparative study operates on two levels: a micro-level analysis of within-culture variations between mainstream culture and the hijab-wearing women; and macro-level analysis of the cross-cultural variation between the British context and the Spanish one. The result is a profound insight into how each discourse reveals the different levels of social integration of hijab-wearing women in these two different contexts.

The Analysis methodology combines Critical Discourse Analysis CDA, Conceptual Metaphor Theory CMT, and Cognitive Linguistics CL. The book introduces a novel analysis methodology for social and linguistic sciences. It is the Cognitive Critical Discourse Analysis methodology CCDA.

The British society has evolved in many respects and democracy has taken root in it since the 17th century. However, gender equality is still an issue and it manifests in politics, workplaces, education and in the media. However, as the scope of this paper permits, I shall confine myself to only the marginalization of women in the media. I will discuss their underrepresentation in the media in the UK and how it reflects the ongoing imbalance of power across the British society between women and men. The discussion will be based on the analysis of two different articles.

Political discourse is an integral part of cross-cultural communication, a way of interaction between political elites and the population. Various means of stylistic devices of expressiveness are used by many politicians today to have the most significant impact on the audience. According to the research work, ways of intellectual influence are often used in the media, and one of them is an idiom. The author's stress and the variety of idiomatic foundations in modern English are rich and diverse in their representation types. The relevance of the research work is determined by the fact that understanding the meaning of idiomatic units is extremely important in the communication process to determine the semantic load and political orientation of a text or speech. The article deals with the analysis of idioms functioning in the political discourse reflecting characteristic cultural features based on British and American political texts. The authors stress the importance of linguistic and cultural cooperation while process interpretation. According to work, the analysis of idioms meaning in public speeches of famous British and American politicians is a challenging task considering the difference in language and cultural perception of different cultures: British and American. One must mention, to avoid misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication, it is necessary to know the various aspects' ground of such a language phenomenon as an idiomatic unit. The research work aims to study the variability of English and American idioms based on political texts and give their Russian equivalents if possible.

This paper focuses on how India and Ukraine are represented in the Russian and British newspapers seen in the context of postcolonial theory and, in particular, Edward Said’s conceptualisation of orientalism. The aim of research was to locate differences and similarities in the UK’s and Russia’s construction of truth about their former dependencies and find out whether it is characterised by orientalism; to try the limits of theory; to try the compatibility of quantitative methods with the postcolonial theoretical approach. The researcher selected "The Sun," "The Times" (UK), "Izvestiya" and "Trud" (Russia) as the object of study.

In the latest round of major terrorism incidents that have hit a number of countries in recent years, it is the home-based general reporters who are relied on to cover breaking news. Whereas previously the media have sent foreign correspondents on 'hostile environments' training to help them to work safely 'on the road', there has been considerably less thought given to the safety of field reporters sent out to cover terrorism attacks in the vicinity of newsrooms. This paper addresses points made in the UNESCO 'Research agenda on the safety of journalists' document (Pöyhtäri, 2017): point 2, concerning journalists covering terrorism and unrest and point 5, concerning 'practitioner issues', namely journalists' perceptions and awareness of safety. This paper uses qualitative interviewing of a range of editors from six countries (Australia, Belgium, France, Russia, the UK and the USA) to find out how they cover terrorism at home and whether or not they consider it necessary to provide extra safety training for their reporters.

The phenomenon of protests, currently on the rise in worldwide democracies, is made known to citizens mainly through representations in the media. This article, responding to the need for a broader view of protest media coverage in an international context, examines the ways the 2014 Hong Kong (HK) protests were covered by the online versions of two highly influential and appealing newspapers, belonging to contrasting media systems: The Guardian and China Daily. By revising a typology of previously used frames and inventing new ones, this study conducts a quantitative content analysis of news articles with the view to (a) highlight similarities and differences in the media coverage of protests within the above-mentioned media systems, (b) find out whether the media coverage of such events with political ramifications is affected by the geopolitical interests of the countries. Based on our analysis, this study suggests the need for revising the protest paradigm as important factors—t...

The subject of this article are the linguistic means used to form the image-concept "Russia". Corpus content analysis on the wide range material of the British print and electronic press for 2017-2019 is the base for constructing the nominative field with the core and near, far and final peripheries of image "Russia". The conceptual analysis revealed verbal means used for expansion of the concept volume and its component layers-metaphorical, nominative, evaluative and associative. These devices create the negative image-concept of state Russia in British public consciousness.

The Egyptian revolution in 2011 fundamentally undermined Orientalist assumptions, calling into question the viability of such stereotypes. The rise of Orientalism in Western media, particularly since 9/11, has been well documented, but little work has been done considering the continuation or alteration of such stereotypes in light of events in the Middle East.

This paper plots the changing focus of Orientalist critique, from concerns within academia to a focus on media discourse, and suggests such a change is justified considering the important role media plays in forming opinions and debate. The paper uses qualitative and quantitative analysis – using Critical Discourse Analysis and Issue Framing- to discover the extent to which such tropes continued to be presented in the immediate coverage of the Egyptian revolution. The study finds that British newspaper editorials did, in general, continue with Orientalist themes and ideas, and that such themes showed remarkable resilience.

Tags; Egyptian Revolution, Orientalism, Discourse Analysis, Issue Framing, British Media.

The coverage of the Ukraine-Russia crisis by Russian mainstream media has become notorious and very often talked of in terms of propaganda and hybrid warfare. In fact, it did not just pop out of the blue; on the contrary, it has been around for a very long time. When we look at it from the vantage point of Orientalist theory, it becomes clear that Russian media employ essentially Orientalist frames inherited from Soviet and Russian imperial journalism and literature. Even more interestingly, comparison of the findings with the Western press suggests that this Orientalist optic has also been traditionally used to deal with Ukraine there, although not in such a blatant way as it is in Russia.
This paper presents the discourse analysis of a sample of Russian and British newspapers from 2009 – the year of the so-called “second gas war” and Ukrainian presidential campaign – as well as from later examples (such as scandals related to Euro 2012) to trace the Orientalist framing of Ukraine in the Russian and British press in a comparative perspective and against a background of the coverage of former colonies (such as the coverage of India in the UK). Apart from that, results of corpus linguistics analysis will also be brought forth to form a basis for valid and reliable inferences.

This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’, as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.

... planting the idea that Turkey will not be subjected to an objective evaluation process by EU authorities. Additionally, as clearly stated in the following sentence, “Turkey must undergo a 'major cultural revolution' if it is ever to join the European Union, France's President ...

The male body in contemporary gay culture is subordinated to distinct aesthetic and ethical norms that reflect an all-male idolization of the young, muscular, smooth, and transcendent physique. The queer body is manipulated in different techniques including daily work at the gym, diet, hair supplement/removal, tanning, and dying. Liberating the body from heteronormative oppression does not necessarily guarantee the liberation of the (gay) body from other powerful systems that produce and commercialize body fascism. This article problematizes these body politics and economy of identity focusing on the naked issue of Attitude (October 1999), a six-year-old British life-style glossy magazine. This analysis mainly focuses on the illuminating interview with five gay men who express their intimate feelings and criticize the body worship in the gay media: an over-weight man, a skinny man, a psoriasis sufferer, an old and heavily tattooed and pierced man, and a bodybuilder who works as an escort.

This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’, as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.

Click on MP3 link here for the talk - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uhMmdINpBj1FKj6hiFJ1e-tx-q8JRIhw/view?usp=sharing
Public talk  on Sarah Kane and British Culture, as part of the Artist-in-Residence programme, Wakabacho Wharf, Yokohama, Japan held 1st February 2018. Japanese and English. Funded by Kanagawa Prefecture Visiting Artists Fund. Topics discussed include Greenham Common, Middle England, Thatcherism and Hillsborough.

First describes the principal media industries in contemporary Britain, including publishing, the press, broadcasting, music, cinema, advertising, and new media. Then analyzes media policy, examining the impact of the state, the European Union, and grassroots campaigns on the structure and activities of media. Finally, analyses a range of different media and cultural texts with a view to illustrating the wealth of approaches and methods which can be drawn on to understand the contemporary media scene.