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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The chapter explores the coverage of Brexit by three Portuguese
newspapers, Correio da Manhã, Público and Expresso, between 4 June and 4
July 2016. From a methodological point of view, critical discourse analysis
was used to analyse the way in which Portuguese journalists and columnists
represented the question of political agency, namely i) the degree of
prominence and framing power of each of the British actors involved in the
referendum ‘battle’; ii) the interpersonal relation/evaluative attitude at
European level of the opposing social actors, that is, on one side the ‘doers’
(David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage) and, on the other, the
‘done-tos’ (particularly the EU) in the process.
The study revealed that the emphasis on the confrontational framework
(UK versus EU) effaced the importance of the intraparty power struggle
among the Tories; it blurred the peculiar nature of the so-called British
‘awkwardness’ in relation to the process of European integration; and it
recentred the reader’s attention even more vigorously on the struggle
between the sovereign will of a nation state and the supranationalism of the
European project to the point that the EU ended up being constructed as
‘Other’. The double representation to which the EU is subjected, figuring
simultaneously as passive agent, the recipient of the action triggered by David
Cameron, and active agent, being responsible for the process that led to the
victory of Brexit, is indissociable from the Portuguese recontextualisation of
the theme and its left-right politicisation as a result of the austerity policies
imposed on Portugal and the EU’s much publicised lack of solidarity towards the indebted countries of Southern Europe.
Description
Keywords
Brexit Media European Union Discourse analysis
Pedagogical Context
Citation
Simões-Ferreira, I. (2018). Discursive dimensions of the EU Referendum 2016 press coverage in Portugal. In A. Ridge-Newman, F. León-Solis & H.O’Donnell (eds.), Reporting the Road to Brexit: International Media and the EU Referendum 2016 (pp. 223-238). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan