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Reporting the Road to Brexit: The EU Referendum and the Media

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Reporting the Road to Brexit

Abstract

The United Kingdom’s 2016 EU referendum, and its ‘Brexit’ outcome, were major international events that fuelled significant coverage in both national and international contexts. However, did news media from around the world construct a homogenous global narrative? If so, how? One BBC News story portrayed international newspapers as framing Brexit as an international crisis akin to a natural disaster. This introductory chapter examines these themes through an engagement with international political communication theories that provide useful concepts like the ‘domestication’ and ‘globalization’ of news content. Furthermore, the chapter offers insights into the project’s major themes; key contexts and definitions; the scope of the book; and a brief outline of the other chapters. It concludes that news media serving locales with closer cultural, political and economic proximities to the European Union appear to exhibit higher discursive tendencies in reporting the road to Brexit, and the outcome of the referendum, as a crisis.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK

    Anthony Ridge-Newman

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  1. Anthony Ridge-Newman
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Correspondence to Anthony Ridge-Newman .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Anthony Ridge-Newman

  2. University of the West of Scotland, Paisley, United Kingdom

    Fernando León-Solís

  3. Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, United Kingdom

    Hugh O'Donnell

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Ridge-Newman, A. (2018). Reporting the Road to Brexit: The EU Referendum and the Media. In: Ridge-Newman, A., León-Solís, F., O'Donnell, H. (eds) Reporting the Road to Brexit. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73682-2_1

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