Introduction
On 24 June 2016, BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) News published a story exploring the reactions of newspapers from around the world, following the internationally prominent referendum held the previous day in which voters of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) and Gibraltar (a British Overseas Territory, bordering Spain ) voted overall to leave the European Union (EU). The BBC claimed that:
Britain’s vote to leave the European Union has caused widespread dismay in the European media and beyond. Many commentators see the future of the entire EU at risk from further Eurosceptic challenges. (BBC News 2016)
The BBC story presented front pages of select newspapers from around the world, which played into a narrative that the outcome of the referendum was an international crisis akin to a natural disaster , with an emphasis on language like ‘widespread dismay’; ‘Earthquake in Europe ’; ‘Goodbye to Europe ’; and ‘Domino effect’. Crisis frames and periods of significant political change have a long-standing relationship (Hay 1999). The discursive activities centred on the 2016 EU referendum are thought to be no exception (Higgins 2016), which is indicated by a number of chapters in this book.
Caiani and Guerra (2017) suggest that Euroscepticism is a growing crisis across Europe and that the media are central to the relationship between citizens and the democratic functions of the EU. While scholars argue that news media, like broadcast news and the press , play a crucial role in referendum campaigns (for example, Jenssen et al. 1998; de Vreese and Semetko 2002; Dekavalla 2016), academic analysis of the dynamics between referendums and news media is relatively thin when compared to related areas of political communication , like, for example, the more developed understanding of media and general elections (for example, Strömbäck and Dimitrova 2006; Strömbäck and van Aelst 2010; Negrine 2017; Cushion and Thomas 2018). Blain et al. (2016) is a notable contribution to our understanding of the relationship between referendums and the media. With a focus on Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum , the collection of scholarly works explores issues of media ‘representation ’ versus media ‘construction’ in national and international contexts. It sheds light on how a referendum in one locale can generate public discourse and catalyse introspective debate related to the internal dialogues of another.
This EU referendum project takes a similar approach. It aims to contribute to the growing literature on referendums and the media, with interests related to the representation versus construction question in the context of the 2016 EU referendum and ‘Brexit ’ (Britain’s exit from the EU). It aims to do this through presenting and comparing a range of analyses of British and international news media contexts. This introductory chapter aims to offer insights into the project’s: major themes; key contexts and definitions; the scope of the book; and a brief outline of the chapters.
EU Referendum and the Media Project
Recent developments and global media interest in events such as Spain ’s Catalonia independence debate and Brexit suggest the mounting importance for scholarly analyses of the relationships between media discourse , the ‘“global” public sphere ’ (Volkmer 2003) and these increasingly common democratic phenomena. Such analyses fit the study of international political communication in which two key debates around the ‘globalization (homogenization ) and “domestication ” (diversification) of news content’ (Clausen 2004: 25) inform observations in international news contexts. The globalist paradigm posits that international political communication flows outside of traditional media systems in their domestic contexts, thus creating a transformed transglobal media environment in which news media construct a global public sphere characterized by discourses with broader transitional, transregional and transcontinental relevance (Volkmer 1999, 2003). However, this is in contrast to the notion that international news undergoes a ‘domestication ’ process in which global news items are constructed around the ‘dominant ideologies’ of their locale, thus resulting in news outlets ‘domesticating the foreign’ and constructing more ‘culturally specific’ discourses (Gurevitch et al. 1991: 205–206). Clausen (2004) argues that both factors contribute to news production in the global news environment.
Examples like the BBC article above have stimulated research interests in the examination of ideology, bias and framing impacts in media discourses (Cotterrell 1999; Entman 2007, 2010). The chapters of this book engage with such topics and debates using a range of methodological approaches (for example, discourse analysis; and content analysis) in order to examine whether and how news media in different locales constructed events in the run-up to and shortly after the 2016 EU referendum . Therefore, the book focuses on media reaction to the referendum campaign and the result, rather than the lengthy and ongoing aftermath of ‘post-Brexit ’ events (see the Preface for context). The study of media and politics offers interdisciplinary opportunities. Therefore, the project aims to take a pluralistic approach in order to engage perspectives from diverse geographical locales. The chapters offer a range of cases for comparison, from empirical analyses to essays, all of which offer perspectives that contribute to the exploration of the book’s overarching questions.
The Questions
Since the 2016 EU referendum , the Europhile ideal in which the European public sphere would embody a transnational citizenry with equal access and ability to understand and interpret communications in relation to EU policies and initiatives (Schlesinger 1999) seems a distant prospect. Research suggests that European news media are yet to foster a dedicated agenda that engages publics in EU issues and promotes collective support of Europeanization (de Vreese 2007; Valentini and Nesti 2010; Papathanassopoulos and Negrine 2011; Lloyd and Marconi 2014). So, then, how did international news media react to Britain’s EU referendum?
As indicated above, a consistent curiosity throughout this book centres on themes related to how news media construct narratives around Brexit debates in different contexts that are specific to certain geographical locales. News outputs in reaction to significant global events are thought to embody ingredients that are selected in order to offer a particular flavour for media consumption (Neureiter 2017; Venkataraman 2018). It is, therefore, pertinent for academic analysis to explore how media frames and constructed narratives in one context compare to others. As the following section suggests, und...