Othering the European Union through constructing moral panics over ‘im/migrant(s)’ in the coverage of migration in three British newspapers, 2011–2016

Abstract

The article offers a corpus-driven computer-assisted analysis of newspaper language immediately surrounding ‘im/migrant(s)’ in the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and the Sun and their Sunday publications between 2011 and 23 June 2016. Drawing on moral panic and social representations theories, the study reveals that the newspapers increasingly ‘othered’ the European Union (EU) through constructing moral panics over ‘illegal’/‘EU’ ‘im/migrant(s)’ prior to the referendum, despite noticeable differences across them. It confirms that the EU was imagined as the origin and conduit of migrants entering the UK, especially by the two right-wing newspapers, constructing an antagonism between Britain and the EU, with implications for understanding the role of news media in shaping and signifying public discourses about Brexit. The conventional stigmatising norms labelling ‘immigrants’ have been adopted and extended to associate the object of the EU with the moral panics over ‘immigrants’, which reflects the changes in social representations of ‘immigrants’ and ‘the EU’.