British Media Representations of EU Migrants Before and After the EU Referendum

Abstract

One of the most topical issues in British media and political discourses both before and after the 2016 EU referendum was European migration to the UK, which caused concern about mass migration and the potential loss of nationalsovereignty. This paper analyses discursive representations of EU migrants in the British press between 2013 and 2018. The corpus-assisted analysis traces the linguistic devices employed in the press in reference to European migrants and migration within the EU in the prereferendum (2013–2015) and post-referendum periods (2016–2018), with a focus on the different patterns employed by the left- and right-wing newspapers. The analysis also aims to uncover discursive differences in terms of how Europeans are represented compared with the British. The data represent two specialised news corpora, each containing 500 editorials, opinion pieces and news reports from five mainstream British newspapers. The study combines corpus-assisted analysis with discourseanalytical methods to investigate ideological bias in the British press.