Lecturer in Digital Media Dr Anthony Ridge-Newman has published a new book exploring the international media’s responses to the Brexit outcome.
Reporting the road to Brexit: International Media and the EU Referendum 2016 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) explores how news media around the world construct narratives.
Dr Ridge-Newman said: “The United Kingdom’s 2016 European Union referendum, and its Brexit outcome, were major international events that fuelled significant media coverage in both British and international contexts. It is important that we understand how Britain is portrayed internationally, because it has implications for the ongoing wider international negotiations related to Brexit.”
One BBC News story portrayed international newspapers as framing Brexit as an international crisis akin to a natural disaster. The book examines such themes through an engagement with international political communication theories that provide useful concepts like the ‘domestication’ and ‘globalisation’ of news content.
The project includes a contextual preface and 20 chapters, 18 of which form case studies that analyse media representations of the EU referendum and Brexit across 18 global locales, contributed to by 25 leading international scholars.
The majority of cases show evidence of the domestication of news content. The book argues that news media serving locales with closer cultural, political and economic proximities to the European Union contributed more intensive discourses in reporting the road to Brexit.