The discursive construction of anti-European sentiment in the times.co.uk texts

Abstract

The critical study of language has payed particular attention to the discursive construction of concepts such as national identity, ideology or hegemony. In this paper we applied Fairclough's three-dimensional model of CDA to the presentation of European matters in the online texts of The Times, a mass medium noted for its traditional alliance with the British political and economic establishment, analysing the discursive strategies used by text producers in the headlines, leads and stories of 84 reports, opinion articles and editorials in an attempt to identify the ideological components imbued by the text producers and, thus, establish the degree of impartiality towards the European issue and whether the discourse used by this mass medium is an example of the traditional British resistance towards EU integration.