Enemies of the People. A Multimodal Critical Analysis of Populism, the Popular Press and the Judiciary in Post-Brexit Britain
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2020.i15.720Keywords:
populism, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Multimodality, popular press, BrexitAbstract
The article provides an in-depth critical analysis of an article published by the UK mid-market press newspaper the Daily Mail criticizing the role of High Court judges for ruling that Parliamentary approval was necessary to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and formally leave the EU. It argues that the article and the newspaper itself can be considered populist through the discourse strategies that they adopt to represent the pro-Brexit voters and public positively and negatively the three judges involved in the High Court decision. The investigation is based on a fine-tuned multimodal analysis of the newspaper report and demonstrates that textual means are combined with visual means to denigrate the three judges responsible for the decision but further expanded to the entire judiciary and pro-Remain supporters and to legitimize the voice of the “people” of the Daily Mail or those 17.4 million Britons who voted to leave the UK in the referendum of June 2016.References
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Breeze, Ruth. “'Enemies of the people:’ Populist Performances in the Daily Mail Reporting of the Article 50 Case.” Discourse, Context & Media 25 (2018): 60-67.
Chilton, Paul. Analysing Political Discourse. London: Routledge, 2004.
Conboy, Martin. Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community through Language. London: Routledge, 2006.
Cotteril, Janet. Language and Power in Court: A Linguistic Analysis of the O.J. Simpson Trial. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Daddow, Oliver. “The UK Media and 'Europe:’ From Permissive Consensus to Destructive Dissent.” International Affairs 88.6 (2012): 1219-1236.
De Cleen, Benjamin. “The populist Political Logic and the Analysis of the Discursive Construction of ‘the People’ and ‘the Elite.’” Imagining the Peoples of Europe. Populist Discourses across the Political Spectrum. Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019. 19-42.
Edelman, Murray. Political Language: Words that Succeed and Policies that Fail. New York, NY: Academic Press, 1977.
Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. London: Longman, 1989.
Fairclough, Norman, Jane Mulderrig and Ruth Wodak. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” Discourse Studies: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach. Edited by Teun A. Van Dijk. London: SAGE, 2011. 357-378.
Goodwin, Matthew and Caitlin Milazzo. UKIP. Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Henderson, Ailsa, et al. “England, Englishness and Brexit.” The Political Quarterly 87.2 (2016): 187-199.
Herring, Susan C. “Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, Reconfigured, and Emergent.” Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media. Edited by Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester. Washinton, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013. 1-25.
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Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge, 2006.
Laclau, Ernesto. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism. London: New Left Books, 1977.
Machin, David and Andrea Mayr. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction. London: SAGE, 2012.
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Müller, Jan-Werner. What is Populism? London: Penguin, 2017.
Rajah, Jothie. “Legal Discourse.” The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies. Edited by John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson. London: Routledge, 2018. 480-496.
Richardson, John E. Analyzing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.
---. (Mis)Representing Islam: The Racism and Rhetoric of British Broadsheet Newspapers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004.
Royce, Terry. “Synergy on the Page: Exploring Intersemiotic Complementarity in Page-based Multimodal Text.” JASFL Occasional Papers 1.1 (1998): 25-50.
Servidio-Delabre, Eileen. The Legal System of a Common Law Country. Paris: Éditions Dalloz, 2014.
Slack, James. “Enemies of the People: Fury over ‘Out of Touch’ Judges who Have ‘Declared War on Democracy’ by Defying 17.4m Brexit Voters and who Could Trigger Constitutional Crisis.” Daily Mail 3 November 2016.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3903436/Enemies-people-Fury-touch-judges-defied-17-4m-Brexit-voters-trigger-constitutional-crisis.html.
Smith, Geoffrey. “How Left or Right-Wing are the UK's Newspapers?” 2015.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/03/07/how-left-or-right-wing-are-uks-newspapers.
Stevens, Robert. The English Judiciary: Their Role in the Changing Constitution. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005.
Stoegner, Karin and Ruth Wodak. “‘The Man who Hated Britain’—The Discursive Construction of ‘National Unity’ in the Daily Mail.” Critical Discourse Studies 13.2 (2016): 193-209.
Tiersma, Peter. “Capital Instructions: Comprehension as a Matter of Life and Death.” Speaking of Language and Law: Conversations on the Work of Peter Tiersma. Edited by Lawrence Solan, Janet Ainsworth and Roger W. Shuy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 277-284.
---. Legal Language. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
---. Parchment, Paper, Pixels: Law and the Technologies of Communication. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
---. “The Nature of Legal Language.” Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics. Edited by John Gibbons and M. Teresa Turell. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008. 7-25.
Van Dijk, Teun A. Discourse and Context: A Socio-Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
---. “Discourse and Manipulation.” Discourse & Society 17.3 (2006): 359-389.
---. “Socio-Cognitive Discourse Studies.” The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies. Edited by John Flowerdew and John Richardson. London: Routledge, 2018. 26-43.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. Discourse and Practice. New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008.
Wodak, Ruth. The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: SAGE, 2015.
Wodak, Ruth, et al. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. 2nd Edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
Zappettini, Franco and Michał Krzyżanowski. “The Critical Juncture of Brexit in Media & Political Discourses: From National-Populist Imaginary to Cross-National Social and Political Crisis.” Critical Discourse Studies 16.4 (2019): 381-388.
Zienkowski, Jan and Ruth Breeze. “Introduction. Imagining Populism and the Peoples of Europe.” Imagining the Peoples of Europe. Populist Discourses Across the Political Spectrum. Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019. 1-18.
Bingham, Adrian and Martin Conboy. Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015.
Boyd, Michael S. “From News to Comment: Tracing Text Trajectories in News Reporting about the Amanda Knox Trial.” Transmedia Crime Stories: The Trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in the Globalized Media Sphere. Edited by Lieve Gies and Maria Bortoluzzi. London: Palgrave, 2016. 139-164.
---. “(New) Participatory Framework on YouTube? Commenter Interaction in US Political Speeches.” Journal of Pragmatics 72 (2014): 46-58.
---. “Preaching from a Distant Pulpit: The European Migrant Crisis Seen through a New York Times Editorial and Reader Comments.” Migration and Media. Discourses about identities in crisis. Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019. 291-315.
---. “Representation of Foreign Justice in the Media: The Amanda Knox Case.” Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 7.1 (2013): 33-50.
Breeze, Ruth. “'Enemies of the people:’ Populist Performances in the Daily Mail Reporting of the Article 50 Case.” Discourse, Context & Media 25 (2018): 60-67.
Chilton, Paul. Analysing Political Discourse. London: Routledge, 2004.
Conboy, Martin. Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community through Language. London: Routledge, 2006.
Cotteril, Janet. Language and Power in Court: A Linguistic Analysis of the O.J. Simpson Trial. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Daddow, Oliver. “The UK Media and 'Europe:’ From Permissive Consensus to Destructive Dissent.” International Affairs 88.6 (2012): 1219-1236.
De Cleen, Benjamin. “The populist Political Logic and the Analysis of the Discursive Construction of ‘the People’ and ‘the Elite.’” Imagining the Peoples of Europe. Populist Discourses across the Political Spectrum. Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019. 19-42.
Edelman, Murray. Political Language: Words that Succeed and Policies that Fail. New York, NY: Academic Press, 1977.
Fairclough, Norman. Language and Power. London: Longman, 1989.
Fairclough, Norman, Jane Mulderrig and Ruth Wodak. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” Discourse Studies: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach. Edited by Teun A. Van Dijk. London: SAGE, 2011. 357-378.
Goodwin, Matthew and Caitlin Milazzo. UKIP. Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Henderson, Ailsa, et al. “England, Englishness and Brexit.” The Political Quarterly 87.2 (2016): 187-199.
Herring, Susan C. “Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, Reconfigured, and Emergent.” Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media. Edited by Deborah Tannen and Anna Marie Trester. Washinton, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013. 1-25.
Hu, Dalun. “Why (and Types) Lawyers Wear Wigs in Court | Barristers’ Wigs.” 8 September 2018. https://www.wigsmaster.com/wigs-in-court/. All websites were last visited on 20/01/2020.
Jagers, Jan and Stefaan Walgrave. “Populism as Political Communication Style: An Empirical Study of Political Parties’ Discourse in Belgium.” European Journal of Political Research 46 (2007): 319-345.
Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge, 2006.
Laclau, Ernesto. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism. London: New Left Books, 1977.
Machin, David and Andrea Mayr. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction. London: SAGE, 2012.
---. “Personalizing Crime and Crime-fighting in Factual Television: An Analysis of Social Actors and Transitivity in Language and Images.” Critical Discourse Studies 10.4 (2013): 356–372.
Mayr, Andrea and David Machin. The Language of Crime and Deviance: An Introduction to Critical Linguistic Analysis in Media and Popular Culture. New York: Continuum, 2011.
Mudde, Cas and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser. “Populism.” The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies. Edited by Michael Freeden and Marc Stears. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 578-600.
Müller, Jan-Werner. What is Populism? London: Penguin, 2017.
Rajah, Jothie. “Legal Discourse.” The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies. Edited by John Flowerdew and John E. Richardson. London: Routledge, 2018. 480-496.
Richardson, John E. Analyzing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.
---. (Mis)Representing Islam: The Racism and Rhetoric of British Broadsheet Newspapers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004.
Royce, Terry. “Synergy on the Page: Exploring Intersemiotic Complementarity in Page-based Multimodal Text.” JASFL Occasional Papers 1.1 (1998): 25-50.
Servidio-Delabre, Eileen. The Legal System of a Common Law Country. Paris: Éditions Dalloz, 2014.
Slack, James. “Enemies of the People: Fury over ‘Out of Touch’ Judges who Have ‘Declared War on Democracy’ by Defying 17.4m Brexit Voters and who Could Trigger Constitutional Crisis.” Daily Mail 3 November 2016.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3903436/Enemies-people-Fury-touch-judges-defied-17-4m-Brexit-voters-trigger-constitutional-crisis.html.
Smith, Geoffrey. “How Left or Right-Wing are the UK's Newspapers?” 2015.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/03/07/how-left-or-right-wing-are-uks-newspapers.
Stevens, Robert. The English Judiciary: Their Role in the Changing Constitution. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005.
Stoegner, Karin and Ruth Wodak. “‘The Man who Hated Britain’—The Discursive Construction of ‘National Unity’ in the Daily Mail.” Critical Discourse Studies 13.2 (2016): 193-209.
Tiersma, Peter. “Capital Instructions: Comprehension as a Matter of Life and Death.” Speaking of Language and Law: Conversations on the Work of Peter Tiersma. Edited by Lawrence Solan, Janet Ainsworth and Roger W. Shuy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 277-284.
---. Legal Language. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
---. Parchment, Paper, Pixels: Law and the Technologies of Communication. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
---. “The Nature of Legal Language.” Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics. Edited by John Gibbons and M. Teresa Turell. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008. 7-25.
Van Dijk, Teun A. Discourse and Context: A Socio-Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
---. “Discourse and Manipulation.” Discourse & Society 17.3 (2006): 359-389.
---. “Socio-Cognitive Discourse Studies.” The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies. Edited by John Flowerdew and John Richardson. London: Routledge, 2018. 26-43.
Van Leeuwen, Theo. Discourse and Practice. New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008.
Wodak, Ruth. The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean. London: SAGE, 2015.
Wodak, Ruth, et al. The Discursive Construction of National Identity. 2nd Edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.
Zappettini, Franco and Michał Krzyżanowski. “The Critical Juncture of Brexit in Media & Political Discourses: From National-Populist Imaginary to Cross-National Social and Political Crisis.” Critical Discourse Studies 16.4 (2019): 381-388.
Zienkowski, Jan and Ruth Breeze. “Introduction. Imagining Populism and the Peoples of Europe.” Imagining the Peoples of Europe. Populist Discourses Across the Political Spectrum. Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2019. 1-18.
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