Insulting the Public?

The British Press and the European Union

Peter J. Anderson, Tony Weymouth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138154834
• eBook ISBN: 9781317882824
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Sozialgeschichte

Insulting the Public? examines the way in which the European Union and issues relating to it are represented to the public. Combining theoretical and empirical research, the text explores and provides an assessment of the performance of the British Press in its representation of the European Union in the period immediately preceding the General Election of 1997 and during the British presidency of the Union from January to June 1998.

CHAPTER 1

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The press, Europe and questions of cultural identity

Introduction

This book is specifically about the portrayal of the European Union in the British press in the year preceding the General Election of 1997 and during the British EU presidency of 1998. It embraces a study of two fundamental elements in our democracy: first, the organisation and role of the media in general, but particularly that of the written press, and second, and more importantly, the nature and quality of the process of mediation in respect of Britain’s current and future role within the European Union.

To take the European issue first: in the year preceding the General Election of 1997, Britain’s future role in the development of the European Union was thrust into the foreground of public debate by the right wing of the Conservative Party. Indeed, in one of the more dramatic moments of the election campaign itself (April 1997) the then Prime Minister, John Major, presented the nature of Britain’s future engagement with the EU as the single most important issue upon which the fate of the government should turn. In the event, this insight into the most important issue occupying the minds of the electorate appears to have been clouded. What, in retrospect, now looks clear is that John Major’s gamble served only to emphasise his party’s deep divisions over Europe with what some observers have deemed to be fatal results.

It is probably true to say that the most articulate expression of ‘Euroscepticism’ is indeed located in the parliamentary Conservative Party. But it also found expression to the right of it in the Referendum Party, and to the left, among ‘old’ Labour parliamentarians such as Douglas Jay, Tony Benn and, most recently, the former speaker of the House of Commons, the late Lord Tonypandy. Euroscepticism, then, is a phenomenon which straddles the political divide, both inside and outside Westminster, although its most intense manifestation (and most pronounced consequences) has been mostly apparent on the right of British politics.

The new British government under the premiership of Tony Blair has a self-declared more unanimous and relaxed attitude towards Britain’s role in the European Union. Nevertheless, it is clear that New Labour is proceeding in its approach to the issue of our future EU commitments in a manner which ranges from caution (employment, single currency, common foreign policy, fishing) on the one hand, to outright resistance (abolition of frontier controls, common defence force as at July 1998, tax harmonisation) on the other. The proposed move by the EU to the single currency means that the New Labour government (and indeed the British people, since they will be consulted by referendum) face a period of difficult decision making in respect of Britain’s political, social and economic participation in Europe in the twenty-first century and beyond.

We come now to the second element, the part played by the media in this process of decision making about Europe. Political action in a western liberal democracy does not normally occur in an arbitrarily imposed and unannounced fashion. If it does then there are other names for the regime – autocratic, authoritarian, totalitarian – with which to qualify its character. The political process in Britain is the expression (however convoluted) of public opinion expressed regularly at the ballot-box and less formally through other means between elections. Public opinion, in turn, is constituted and shaped by information being presented to the public sphere (via parliament, official reports, on-the-spot investigative journalism) and its subsequent relaying to the people by the media. So, along with the rest, British policy towards further European integration is mostly represented to the people by the media. We find our information, and form our opinions, by consulting, using and interacting with one of the most sophisticated systems of communications in the world.

In this study we set out to answer some important questions about the democratic process in Britain today which relate specifically to the origins of information about Europe, and to the manner in which this information is relayed to the public by the media in general and by the press in particular. To be more specific, these questions envelop complex and sensitive issues linked to perceptions of national identity, to our history, to political and economic contingencies, and to the role of the media in representing (or mediating) these issues to the public. As these themes suggest, we shall need to approach the subject via a series of questions which invite answers from a range of disciplines and sources. These questions, to which some answers will be sought in the course of this book, may be summarised as follows:

● How do the British perceive themselves? Is this perception justifiable and in any case does it support or undermine further development in British participation inside the EU?

● How are British claims to identity and special interests represented to the public?

● What are the arguments for and against Britain’s further integration with the European Union?

● What is the quality of representation of European issues in the media in general and how does the public interact with this representation?

● Does the written press in particular offer an adequate representation of these European issues to the public?

Specifically, in this chapter we shall examine aspects of what, for want of a more precise term, may be called British cultural identity, and the way in which this identity is expressed in media discourse. We shall point to a trend towards an alleged conversationalisation of public discourse, to the presence of media bias in both overt and covert forms, and comment upon the way in which these phenomena may influence or be used by the public. Finally, we shall propose an approach to the analysis of media texts – critical discourse analysis – which underlines and takes account of the essential socio-cultural factors which underpin, and bear upon, the diverse expressions of media discourse within a modern democracy such as Britain. This chapter, then, lays the foundations for a fuller understanding of our commentaries on the press coverage of Europe which we offer in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. We shall maintain the focus upon the representation of Europe by frequent illustrations of discourse taken from the press on this topic.

Let us begin this chapter then by examining certain contemporary issues which are linked to the concept of cultural identity in Britain and the manner in which this identity finds, or fails to find, its expression in the media.

Perceptions of identity

There are today diverse and widespread perceptions held by a variety of social and ethnic groups relating to an imagined community called Britain, and they partly account for ambiguous British attitudes towards continental Europe. In particular, there is one perception (to which we shall return a little later in this chapter) which is noteworthy at this point, if only to demonstrate how perceptions of ourselves may change in the course of a few decades.

There was a time, not so long ago, when a perceived British fondness for reticence, understatement and stiff upper-lipped authority was a longstanding and slightly baffling joke among people who lived beyond our national frontiers. It was, of course, a myth, or at least a very incomplete perception, and one furthermore which was half-encouraged (since it was a convenient and mostly benign caricature), possibly originating in our imperial past, and our geographical and linguistic isolation from the rest of Europe. One characteristic of a mythical, imagined identity is its tendency towards over-generalisation, sometimes to the point where the original grain of truth loses its force. It seems unlikely that the British by nature are or were any less outgoing than the French or the Italians, or any other peoples for that matter. This particular view of ourselves, as we have said, may derive from linguistic and geographical factors as well as from a limited contact abroad with a group of British colonial administrators, diplomats, soldiers, scholars, and well-heeled travellers who together constituted a small and mannered social elite. In the light of the current revival of interest in regional and national identity in Scotland, Wales and Ireland, this perception of cultural identity, extrapolated from a small elite of English language speakers and applied to the whole national community, has long outlived its uses. If we add to this revival of regionalism the presence of people who constitute significant ethnic minorities living in Britain today, then the original perception described above becomes even less sustainable.

We shall return to the role that an imagined cultural identity plays in British attitudes towards Europe later in this section. For the moment we use the example quoted above to underline the difficulty in reconciling such a self-serving view of ourselves (self-serving, that is, for a particular minority at a particular time in history) with those now emerging from regional, ethnic and other social groupings (not the least of which was that which emerged from the explosion of a youth culture in the 1960s), which have apparently turned this particular myth on its head. In the latter case, the irreverence, raucousness and distinctly uncontrolled outburst of cultural determination which began thirty or so years ago, is the very antithesis of the earlier representation of restraint, understatement and authority fostered at a different time by a different social stratum of British society.

How, then, should the British be perceived or perceive themselves? The wise counsel must be ‘with extreme caution’. Social theorists are at pains to point out the pitfalls that beset traditional views in matters relating to cultural identity. Perceptions based upon popular notions of historical ‘essence’ of the kind commonly expressed in some sectors of the media (see Chapter 3) are considered, at best, partial and, at worst, crude representations of cultural identification. Hall and others, offer a traditional view of cultural identification (in order to refute it) of the kind we have mentioned briefly above as follows:

… identification is constructed on the back of a recognition of some common origin or shared characteristic with another person or group, or with an ideal, and with a natural closure of solidarity and allegiance established on this foundation. (Hall, 1996:2)

It is worth briefly noting here that this traditional attitude towards cultural identity, which characterises some media representation (although no longer in quite the crude fashion as in our original example) in Britain, is not restricted to this country alone. Nor, it has to be said, is it completely without foundation: claims to group identity based upon ethnic characteristics and historical events can be valid but they are always incomplete and transitory. These kinds of traditional, historically rooted perceptions of identity are to be found in all western democracies. However, Hall and other contemporary social theorists disavow this traditional (or essentialist) view in favour of what may be called a process of discursive practice. In this light, cultural identification is not perceived in terms of a set of cohesive features – our essence – identifiable in our past as well as our present. It is seen instead as an ongoing process of construction which is never completed. For Hall identity is a phenomenon of becoming rather than being, of where we are going rather than of who we are. The concept of ‘closure’ mentioned above, and associated by social theorists with the essentialist view of group identity, designates the response made by a specific social group, at a specific place and time (usually at a time of uncertainty) which is intended to defend a perceived status quo from some external threat or ‘the Other’ as the latter is often referred to in the literature. This ‘closure’ around a perceived identity, according to Bauman, is ‘a name given to the escape sought to that uncertainty’ (Bauman, 1996:19). Thus (and relating to an important aspect of the subject matter of this book), according to contemporary social theory it could plausibly be argued that one element at least of recent expressions of Euroscepticism in Britain stems from the presence of and perceived threat from an external ‘Other’, namely continental Europe. To elaborate slightly: contemporary views in social theory support the explanation that traditional cultural identity, claimed for Britain in some sections of the mass media and elsewhere, is based on perceptions not only of what Britain is in terms of its historical essence, but also upon perceptions of what Britain is not in certain key domains of our national life, compared with the rest of Europe. In other words, in addition to its alleged ‘essence’, its identity is further constituted ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Press, Europe and questions of cultural identity
• 2 European integration: the issues at stake
• 3 Euroscepticism in the British press
• 4 The pro-European press
• 5 The British presidency of the European Union, 1998
• 6 The Great Public Relations Disaster?
• 7 Producers, consumers and users of information
• 8 Insulting the Public?
• Appendix I SPEAKING is media discourse
• Appendix II Tony Blair's speech to the French National Assembly 24 March 1998
• Appendix III William Hague's speech to the INSEAD Business School, Fontainebleau 19 May 1998
• Bibliography
• Index