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The representation of refugees,

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Discourse & Society

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The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British

newspapers during the Balkan conflict (1999) and the British general
election (2005)
Majid KhosraviNik
Discourse Society 2009; 20; 477
DOI: 10.1177/0957926509104024
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http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/20/4/477

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ARTICLE

KhosraviNik: The representation of RASIM in the British newspapers

477

The representation of refugees, asylum

seekers and immigrants in British newspapers
during the Balkan conflict (1999) and the
British general election (2005)

MAJID KHOSRAVINIK

Discourse & Society

Copyright 2009
SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi,
Singapore and Washington DC)
www.sagepublications.com
Vol 20(4): 477498
10.1177/0957926509104024

LANCASTER U N IVERSITY, U K

This article is a CDA investigation into the representation of

refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants during two major events: the Balkan
conflict in 1999 and the British general election in 2005 as reflected in British
newspapers. The article is part of a larger project on the representation of
these groups of people between 1996 and 2006 in British newspapers. The
study shows that while there are major similarities in the micro-linguistic
categories used in representations of these groups in these two periods, e.g.
the metaphors, the overall communicated messages are not similar and the
macro-structural contexts behind the processes of interpretation of these
discourses play a determining role in transferring certain meanings. The
research also shows that while newspapers have different strategies in their
representations due to their political standpoints, in some important ways
they all contribute to a similar construction of these people.

ABSTRACT

KEY WORDS:

asylum seekers and immigrants, British newspapers, critical discourse

analysis, in-groups, out-groups, RASIM project, refugees, representation of social actors

Introduction
The liberal and egalitarian discourses in modern societies have impacted on
the qualities of constructing the out-groups. It is argued that the major human
catastrophes of the Holocaust in Europe and slavery in the USA have influenced
the older discourses on out-grouping and have oriented them to take on a quasiargumentative elaboration focusing on culture rather than race in the construction of us versus them (Van Dijk, 1991: 25; Billig, 2006).
Within such a context, British newspapers have increasingly been engaged
in discourses on/about immigration, refugees and asylum seekers within the
last 10 years, throughout various domestic and international issues.1 The
present paper will focus on two critical points in time the Balkan conflict in

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478 Discourse & Society 20(4)

March 1999 and the British general election in May 2005, and account for discursive representations of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants (henceforth
RASIM) in the British newspapers. The analysis also attempts to account for
the differences and similarities in the qualities of discursive representations
of these groups among a variety of newspapers, i.e. liberal/conservative and
tabloids/broadsheets.
The article first provides a discussion on critical discourse analysis and
reviews a number of studies on representations of RASIM. Next, the RASIM
project and the data selection procedures of the study will be reviewed. The
analysis section will bring examples from the body of text analyses of the two
events, and finally some general conclusions will be made in terms of the link
between language use, the contexts and the qualities of representation of
RASIM in the British newspapers.

Critical discourse analysis

Wetherell and Potter (1992), drawing on Foucault, describe modern ways of
power enforcement as less obvious rituals, less clearly repressive and coercive
in some ways less physical and more mental. That is, in modern societies power
has a more discoursal nature it is acquired and accumulated through some form
of collective consent (real or constructed) which may or may not be the outcome
of a true deliberation in a Habermasian sense. Consequently mass media and the
apparatus of reaching out to collective minds gain a central role in proliferating,
topicalizing, de-topicalizing and creating knowings and/or beliefs.
Van Dijk emphasizes the discursive nature of power in democratic societies
and the role of consensus-making practices, and argues that through such a
framework, mass media are assigned a nearly exclusive control over the symbolic
resources needed to manufacture popular consent, especially in the domain of
ethnic relations (1991: 423). His study on the processes of discriminatory discourse in interpersonal communications shows that discourses disseminated
through the mass media play a major intermediary role in the reproduction of
public conceptualizations of out-groups and provide the input for most adult
citizens thoughts and talks about ethnic groups (Van Dijk, 1987). Hartmann and
Husband believe that mass media are capable of providing frames of reference
or perspective within which people become able to make sense of events and of
their experience (1974: 16).
Critical discourse analysis (henceforth CDA), as an approach in discourse
analysis, maintains that discourse is not only a container and carrier of ideologies but is also a social action on its own. CDA is socially and politically committed (Van Dijk, 2001), and by definition needs to account for the links between
its detailed textual linguistic analyses and various levels of socio-political
contexts affecting the processes of production, distribution and interpretation
of language.
CDA holds that discourse as in language use in any form is both socially
constitutive as well as socially conditioned (Fairclough and Wodak, 1997: 258).
That is, not only does it reflect a picture, perhaps incomplete, of the ideology at

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KhosraviNik: The representation of RASIM in the British newspapers

work, but it also shapes those social cognitions. Thus, the relationship between
discourse and ideologies is dialectic (Fairclough, 2001). CDA deals with ideology
as one of its core concepts and aims to explain the dynamics of discourse
and society.
Ideologies are constantly formed and reshaped by new discourses and interdiscursive dynamics. At the same time, power is not believed to derive from the
language per se. Power manifests itself in language, not only through microlinguistic choices within the text but also by the choice of a social occasion by
means of the genre of a text (Weiss and Wodak, 2003: 13) as well as topics and
argumentative strategies.
Symbolic elites as people who have access to and control over mass public
discourses,2 e.g. politicians, journalists, scholars, writers, directors and policy
setting boards of internationally effective media, have preferential control
over the re/production and re/creation of hegemonic narratives in mass communication events and hence acquire more power (Van Dijk, 2005). This is linked
to Thompsons (1990) encapsulation of ideology as social forms and processes
within which, and by means of which, hegemonic symbolic forms circulate in
the social world (cited in Reisigl and Wodak, 2009: 3).
Criticality as a defining characteristic of CDA influences all levels of
an analysis, such as the identification of a social problem, data selection,
methodology and analysis. Criticality is directly linked with the concept of contextualization and hence the essential inter-disciplinarity of CDA. Contextualization is the link that a CDA study makes between language and society in order
to gain a proper understanding of how language functions in constituting and
transmitting knowledge, in organizing social institutions or in exercising power
(Wodak and Meyer, 2009: 7). Contextualization in one sense is to accentuate the
role of historicity in the process of production and interpretation of discourse
and explicitly includes social-psychological, political and ideological components and thereby postulates an interdisciplinary procedure (Meyer, 2001: 15).
While CDA may take an inductive or deductive approach in terms of accounting
for the links between linguistic analyses and socio-political contexts,3 it attempts
to make explicit the interconnectednss of things, revealing structures of power
and unmasking ideologies (Wodak and Meyer, 2009: 78).
Although CDA does not take this relationship between language and society
to be simply deterministic, it attempts to account for the mediation between language and society. CDA is therefore not interested in investigating a linguistic
unit per se but in studying social phenomena (Wodak and Meyer, 2009: 2). Such
an approach will be capable of accounting for absences as well as presences in the
data (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001).
Wodak maintains that discourse (as in language) is a form of social practice
which functions as the starting point of a demystification journey in a CDA
study. Wodak (2001: 66) defines discourse as:
A complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential interrelated linguistic acts, which
manifest themselves within and across social fields of action and thematically interrelate semiotic, oral and written tokens, very often as texts, that belong to specific
semiotic types, that is genre.

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Discourse & Society 20(4)

Wodak and Meyer (2009: 17) compare the relationship between discourse and
language use to grammar and actual language use. They argue that in the same
way as grammar characterises the structure of sentences, discourse rules characterise utterances/texts that are acceptable within a certain practice.

CDA studies on RASIM

Critical discourse studies of the representations of RASIM and various ethnic
minorities in modern societies have attracted ample attention in CDA.4 Wodak
(1996) accounts for the socio-political and historical context of the development
of racist discourse in Austria in terms of argumentative strategies of constructing a we discourse through self-justification. She maintains that:
the linguistic forms of realising this constitution of an in group and out group . . .
include the use of grammatically cohesive elements, such as personal pronouns,
depersonalisation, generalisation, and equation of incommensurable phenomena; the
use of vague characterisations; and the substantive definition of groups . . . The aim
of . . . a discourse of self justification, which is closely wound up with we discourse,
is to allow the speakers to present herself or himself as free of prejudice or even as a
victim of so-called reverse prejudice. (1996: 116)

The study concludes that the semantic macro-structure of the anti-foreigner

discourse incorporates the elements of difference, deviance and perceived threat.
In this structure, the foreigners damage the host countrys socio-economic
interests while at the same time they are stereotyped as different in terms of
culture and mentality. Reisigl and Wodak (2001), reporting on studies of antiforeigner discourses around the Austria First petition campaign and the text of
the petition, identify certain topoi5 at work in discursive practices of the time.
A short general list of topoi includes: Topos of advantage/usefulness, Topos of
danger/threat, Topos of definition/name interpretation, Topos of burdening/
weighting down, Topos of law/right, Topos of culture, Topos of abuse and Topos
of authority (see also Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999).
Teo (2000) presents a comprehensive study of the construction of immigrants
in the structure of newspapers in Australia, highlighting similar discursive
strategies of negitivization and criminalization of Asian immigrants in Australia.
Similar to Van Dijk (1991) and Wodak (1996), Teo draws on Barkers (1981)
arguments for the newly assigned role for culture as a point of categorization,
distancing and blaming of RASIM (see also Clyne, 2005).
An interesting point regarding xenophobic/discriminatory discourses in
various contexts and times is the striking similarities among these discourses,
both in terms of micro-linguistic features and macro-argumentative structures.
Hartmann and Husband (1974), studying the representation of immigrants
in the media in the early 1970s, find major similarities between anti-Semitic
discourses regarding Jewish immigrants in the 1920s and arguments and discursive strategies used in 1970s discourse on immigration, and argue that in
both historical instances news discourses drew on certain fallacious xenophobic
arguments. An example would be the argument that more immigration will

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KhosraviNik: The representation of RASIM in the British newspapers

cause racism inside the country towards the already established immigrants.
This theme of victimperpetrator reversal is also a widespread argumentative
strategy in contemporary xenophobic discourses (Wodak, 1996; Van Leeuwen
and Wodak, 1999; Teo, 2000).
Van Dijk (1987) confirms the findings of Hartmann and Husband (1974) and
argues that immigration and social problems are redefined as a race problem
concomitant with a clear us/them divide in which these groups are not represented as being part of British society, but as outsiders who preferably should be
kept out. Van Dijk (1991), in a major study on the British press, emphasizes the
genre-specific features of newspaper coverage, and shows how manipulation of
the features of a typical news report such as quotations and sources can play
a significant role in micro-linguistic practices based on a prejudicial ideology.

The RASIM project6

The present paper is part of a research project at Lancaster Universitys
Linguistics and English Language department. The study was a double-angled
investigation in the discursive representations of immigrants, asylum seekers
and refugees in the British newspapers between 1996 and 2006, with one strand
looking into the texts through the traditionally qualitative approach of CDA and
the other adopting the generally quantitative methodology of corpus linguistics
(for reports on the corpus linguistics strand of the project, see Gabrielatos and
Baker, 2008, and for the methodological synergy of the two, see Baker et al.,
2008). The present paper is, however, solely concerned with the CDA strand of
the project and is restricted to the first and last period of analysis (see below).

F I G U R E 1. The frequency of articles on RASIM in British newspapers between 1996 and

2006.7
Source: Gabrielatos and Baker (2008).

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Discourse & Society 20(4)

THE TEXTS

Taking the frequencies of the number of articles on/about RASIM as the

starting point,8 the CDA strand devised a systematic and sensitive mechanism
in downsizing the data.9
As shown in the graph, within the general rise in the number of articles
on/about RASIM, there are five spikes in which RASIM have received an unprecedented amount of attention and hence frequency of articles. These periods
are roughly linked to their relevant world events as follows:
Period 1: March 1999 NATO invasion in Kosovo and Kosovar refugees.
Period 2: September 2001 the 9/11 attacks, issues of asylum seekers in Britain,
the Australian boat people case.
Period 3: May 2002 the second round of the French presidential election
LePen versus Chirac, the schooling of asylum seekers children, the
assassination of Pim Fortyun.
Period 4: March 2004 the Madrid bombing, the asylum bill, East European
immigration checks, the expansion of the EU.
Period 5: May 2005 the campaigns leading up to the British general election.
Such a procedure made the data selection sensitive to the aims of deconstructing
the representation of RASIM in the context of relevant socio-political developments, instead of applying a randomized text selection which is usually advocated
by strictly quantitative approaches. In the next phase, three representative newspapers (along with their Sunday editions) were selected in terms of their formats
and socio-political ideologies as follows:

The Guardian and The Observer: liberal quality newspapers

The Times and The Sunday Times: conservative quality newspapers
The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday: tabloid newspapers.

For detailed textual analysis, the data were further restricted to the articles pertaining to the issues of RASIM in general and those which linked to the events.10

Methodology
Major CDA studies on the Self and Other presentation within Wodaks DiscourseHistorical and Van Dijks Socio-Cognitive approaches have developed useful
methodologies and proposed several analytical categories through which the
representations of these groups in discourse are accounted for.
The five-level analytical method proposed by the Discourse-Historical
Approach, consisting of looking at Referential strategies (naming), Predicational
strategies (attribution), Argumentative strategies (topoi) and Perspectivization,
Mitigation and Intensification strategies, is relevant to the aims and scope of the
present study.11
These discursive strategies12 are mainly devised to account for questions:
1. How are persons, objects, phenomena/events, processes and actions named
and referred to linguistically?

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KhosraviNik: The representation of RASIM in the British newspapers

2. What characteristics, qualities and features are attributed to social actors,

objects, phenomena/events and processes?
3. What arguments are employed in the discourse in question?
4. From what perspectives are these nominations, attributions and arguments
expressed?
5. Are the respective utterances articulated overtly; are they intensified or
mitigated? (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009: 13)
Genre-specific features of the data (i.e. newspaper articles) play an important
role in rendering certain linguistic parameters more effective. Categories like
(i) topics, (ii) topic order, (iii) quotation patterns, (iv) naming the participants and (v) the
distribution of grammatical agency proposed by Van Dijk (1991) in accounting
for British news discourses are relevant to this study. Some of Van Dijks (1991)
proposed categories overlap with DHAs methods, e.g. the macro-topics and the
strategy of naming the participant.
Van Leeuwens (1996) socio-semantic approach to discourse analysis maintains that socio-semantic categorizations need to be taken as the starting point
of discourse analysis, and the representations of different social actors are to be
accounted for by linking these socio-semantic categories with their linguistic
realizations. Van Leeuwens socio-semantic categorization (1996: 66) functions
on a local intra-textual level and can be incorporated within DHAs referential
and predicational strategies. Some of Van Leeuwens most relevant categories
include: Foregrounding/Backgrounding, Passivation/Activation, Personalization/
Impersonalization, Individualization/Assimilation and Functionalization.13

Analysis
1999 NATO INVASION IN KOSOVO AND KOSOVAR REFUGEES
On 24 March 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) attacked
Yugoslav targets after negotiations failed to resolve the three-year-long conflict
between Serbian security forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which
had caused a massive population displacement in Kosovo. After the attack, the
Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign was stepped up and within a week over
300,000 Kosovar Albanians had fled into neighbouring Albania and Macedonia,
with many thousands more displaced within Kosovo, raising the total figure to
850,000 as reported by the United Nations in April 1999 (see Scorgie, 2004 for
the details and history of the conflict).14
Obviously, the key word for this period of analysis is refugee. In line with
the general macro-structure at work, the general evaluation of the situation of
refugees is positive.15 Drawing on the intertextual and interdiscursive elements
of preceding and adjacent recurring topics, such as the Serbian ethnic cleansing
agenda, the widespread topic of an imminent humanitarian crisis and the Serbs
not cooperating with the international community, the analysed newspapers
reflect a generally sympathetic macro-structure. However, this is not to say that
all the newspapers adopted the same discursive and linguistic strategies.
MARCH

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Discourse & Society 20(4)

TOPICS AND ARGUMENTATION

On the topic analysis level,16 the Daily Mail generally presents itself as sympathetic by drawing heavily on topoi of victimization, where the refugees are
represented as helpless, desperate, powerless and the victims of attack. Similarly,
it employs referential and predicational (Wodak, 2001) strategies of representing
refugees engaged in various normal activities. This, in turn, calls on other subsidiary linguistic strategies of individualization: singling out, using proper
names and affiliations, character building (quite the opposite to aggregation
and collectivization strategies widely found in other studies on representation of
RASIM, for example during the British 2005 election). The account incorporates
a substantial amount of narratives from refugees in accounting for their plights.
A typical example of this is in the Daily Mail, headlined Reports from Macedonia
on refugee familys plight (27 March 1999), which shows all these strategies in
one way or another, for example:
He was doing his homework when the tanks stormed the village, a five-year-old boy
sitting quietly at the table with his mother.

Similarly, using proper names, characterization and referring to individual differences would work within the same macro-structure, for example:
Shortly before the Nato bombing started, the family decided to make a break for
freedom. With Bajrie in her arms, Azemine Ilazi led the way. Behind her were her
other children, aged between 13 and seven, and their 65-year-old grandmother Mrs
Arife Kazi.
The Serbian special police burst through the door and handcuffed a man, a simple
Albanian farmer whose family had lived there for generations.

The Daily Mail employs topoi of victimization and humanization by drawing on

discourses of genocide such as the articles headlined They were shoved into
water at gun point, then the soldiers opened fire and threw grenades until no
one was moving (29 March 1999), Flight from genocide (29 March 1999) and
Too late for these tragic victims (31 March 1999), along with topos of ethical
responsibility, for example in the articles headlined How you can help, and Why
we must help them (both on 31 March 1999).
The Times coverage is also, generally, sympathetic towards this group of
refugees, both on the discourse topics and the micro-linguistic levels. The Times
draws on humanization and victimization in focusing on the plight of the refugees
by putting the events in narrative form with ample extensivization, by providing
detailed information on the names, places and conditions of the refugees. It also
uses a significant number of direct quotations on the part of the victims with a
frequent use of proper names.
An example is The Times article (30 March 1999) which is an account of a
fleeing family where there is no negative perspectivization or distancing strategy
through possible micro-linguistic techniques such as hedging, modality, reporting
verbs or other mechanisms.
Bajrum Nikats sank to his knees as a farmer told him he had reached the safety of the
border. His wife, Baki, was convulsed in tears as she embraced her three young

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KhosraviNik: The representation of RASIM in the British newspapers

children. Bajrum described how gunmen burst into their home after dark and gave
them 45 minutes to leave: I walked outside and our whole village of Vil Lanishe
was leaving. My wifes father tried to protest so they just shot him. He was lying at
our feet, dying. They would not let my wife help him. She could not even touch him.
We had to step over his body to get away. We cannot bury him and I doubt we will
ever see our home again.

The accounts of this event (the representation of refugees in Kosovo) frequently

include references to the professions, education and lifestyles of these people,
while in unsympathetic accounts of refugees, none of these qualities are
usually referred to, and the accounts are usually collective with no reference to
the reasons for and conditions of the refugees flights, potential lifestyles, income
levels, education, etc.
While the Daily Mail mainly focuses on the dramatic aspect of the refugees
plight and the coverage of events on the ground, The Times additionally covers
in some articles the tension among the Serbian community in Australia, for
example in the article headlined Protest violence flares in Australia (29 March
1999), and the amplification of the conflict within the Serbian diaspora inside
Britain, such as in the article headlined Live and let live in an anxious suburb
(25 March 1999).
The Times also outlines the historical roots of Serbias claims on Kosovo, for
example in the article headlined Myths lie at the root of Serbias psyche, and the
potential threats of conflict to Europe, such as in the article headlined Europes
tinder box ready to ignite (both on 25 March 1999). There is also the focus on
the problems that refugees entering other countries may cause, in articles headlined Officials impotent as refugees pour in (30 March 1999) and Albania
flooded by rising tide of refugees (29 March 1999).
The Guardians account, on the other hand, while being within the same
macro-structure of support and victimization of Kosovar refugees, is much more
loaded with direct referential and predicational strategies against the protagonist
Serbs and Milosevic, along with strong and explicit predications of atrocity,
murder and genocide to Serbian perpetrators. That is to say, the accounts of the
tabloid the Daily Mail and the conservative broadsheet The Times mainly draw a
picture of a horrible situation in terms of describing a process, focusing on the
victims and insinuating potential problems for tensions inside the UK, whilst
The Guardians account agentivizes the role of the perpetrators, the Serbs, and
the causes of the plight.
MICRO-LINGUISTIC FEATURES

Extensivization describing the actions and situations of refugees in detail and

adding as much subsidiary information as possible is another general strategy
in the positive representation of these groups, where various aspects of the
refugees horrible ordeal are accounted for. This is pursued by all the newspapers
in this period with varying degrees and qualities. For example, the Daily Mail
(27 March 1999) writes:
The first thing Bajrie heard was gunfire. Then, the squeals of the cows and sheep as
they were slaughtered in the fields.

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His mother had carried him in her arms through snowdrifts up to three feet deep,
with her other children and their grandmother trailing behind, to become unwilling
refugees of war.

And The Guardian (29 March 1999) writes:

As the traumatised and exhausted people crossed from Kosovo in misty, rainy weather,
Serb police stripped many of the women of their jewellery. Cars had their licence
plates removed and every person, man, woman and child had their identity papers
confiscated in the hope they will never be able to prove they came from Kosovo,
and hence will not be allowed to return.

There are also processes of direct negative quotations against the Serbs and
humanization of the victims by identifying people with detailed qualities, such
as age and looks. An example can be found in The Guardian (29 March 1999)
which writes:
The Serbs told us never come back; we dont want you back, said Myrdete Krasniqi
as she sat on a low wall outside the towns hospital. Sixteen years old, with
her curly hair pulled back behind her ears, she had premature lines around
her eyes.

The Daily Mail directionalizes its account by incorporating no hedging or other

micro-linguistic processes to perspectivize the content of the narration. For
example, the Daily Mail (27 March 1999) quotes:
My father was born there and so was his father. When we left I could see my neighbours house was burning. They probably burned my house as well.
METAPHORS AND REFERENCES TO LARGE QUANTITIES

There is a remarkably high frequency of references to large numbers and metaphors of large quantities17 in the account of this event. There is an ample use
of the metaphors of large quantities such as water bodies, e.g. floods, influx or
exodus which have been found to construct a negative representation in other
studies and contexts (see note 4 for examples). However, the socio-political
context of this event and, more importantly, the macro-structure of interpretation of discourses about refugees for this particular event constitute a different conclusion rule for the interpretation of these metaphors. Geographical
distance seems to play a role in how a macro-structure is formed regarding this
group of refugees in British newspapers.
Similar to the Daily Mail, e.g. in the article headlined The authorities and
aid groups were unprepared for yesterdays influx (31 March 1999), The Times
incorporates metaphors of natural phenomena, e.g. rising tide, significantly:
The refugees were welcomed by families in Kukes, but the ever-swelling numbers
could not be accommodated . . . Albania flooded by the rising tide of refugees.

(The Times, 29 March 1999)

Similar trends of emphasis on big numbers can be seen in The Guardian. The
use of metaphors like flood and tide do not seem to be working towards a
negative presentation of the refugees in this event and in fact they seem to argue

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KhosraviNik: The representation of RASIM in the British newspapers

for more humanitarian help. This indicates that the use of typical metaphors
for refugees or immigrants (or perhaps any social group) does not automatically
create a negative representation of them, and the function of metaphor use
strictly depends on the social, cultural, political and cognitive elements constituting the interpretative context. These context models will accentuate
certain information units specifically, for example whether the refugees are
pouring into Britain or other countries, or what the assumed reasons for
their arrival are.
THE CRISIS AND THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT

Within the sympathetic representation of refugees in this period, the Daily

Mail in the meantime attempts to negatively present the government, and since
the UK had been participating in bombing campaigns against Serbs, the argumentative schemata of the Daily Mail to represent the government negatively
and sympathize with the victims becomes potentially contradictory. The solution
is to adopt a rather contradictory perspective which blames the government for
escalating the violence by participating in the attacks against the Serbs while
promoting the urgency of the situation and the need for help for the victims. For
example, the Daily Mail (31 March 1999) writes:
For every act of barbarity, every slaughter of the innocent, says Tony Blair, Milosevic
must be made to pay a higher and higher price. Its empty, emotional rhetoric,
and its dangerous. Its the Albanian families who are paying the price for
NATOs bombs and they will pay for years to come. The air attacks havent
helped them.

Thus, a sympathetic representation of refugees and a shared macro-argument

of the need to help among the British newspapers become the subject matter of
political rivalry (see Baker et al., 2008 and KhosraviNik, 2009 for more detail).
Similarly, the conservative broad sheet, The Times, throws doubts on the
governments ability to handle the situation efficiently, e.g. arguing that the politicians must now let us know their true objectives (31 March 1999). The Times
also points to the signs of alarm and speculation at what the situation may
mean for the UK and tries to criticize the government. This point which is
vaguely pursued contradicts with the general macro-argument of urgency for
help and legitimacy of these refugees mobilization. The Times account is also
weary of the refugees coming closer. An example is The Times (30 March 1999)
which writes:
No government has yet announced that it is to open its doors to the displaced
Kosovo Albanians. As it did during the height of the Bosnian war, Britain is likely
to operate an extremely restrictive policy, making it hard for any Albanians
to reach safety in this country.

The Guardian is more explicit in referring to the perpetrators and agentivizes the
atrocities, thus topicalizing the responsibility of the Serbs and the international
community. This goes along with numerous direct narratives of the plights of the
refugees. The Guardian is also critical of the right-wing parties and the West for

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having a double standard and paradoxes, e.g. in the article headlined Refugee
chic (31 March 1999).
It can also be argued that there are differences in discursive strategies found in
the conservative broadsheet (The Times) and the tabloid (the Daily Mail). The Times
is more reliant on argumentation whilst the Daily Mail predominantly depends on
referential and predicational strategies. The Daily Mail (perhaps expectedly) is
more sensational, through employing more vivid, graphic descriptions of the
situation by relying on emotion, human interest and first-hand experiences.
BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION, MAY 2005

The key words used by the three newspapers under investigation in this period
are immigration and asylum seekers. As the political conservative discourses
tend to adopt a negative approach towards immigration and foreigners, there are
several stories in The Times and the Daily Mail in which immigrants and asylum
seekers are presented as being involved in asocial or negative activities, e.g. the
Daily Mail (3 April 2005). The conservative broadsheet (The Times) and the tabloid
(the Daily Mail) incorporate strategies of individualization in characterizing
RASIM only when they are involved in negative actions, for example in The Times
article headlined HIV assault appeal loss (18 March 2005) where the association of asylum seekers and crime is topicalized in detail.
In the coverage of The Times, the issue of immigration at times becomes the
central element of political debates. On such occasions, the liberal broadsheet
newspaper, The Guardian, also merely resorts to numbers and collective categorization to argue against the rival party. This is where RASIM turn into a
de-humanized issue, while The Guardians approach in these cases becomes
defensive and evasive.
The Guardian includes topics relating the stories of specific immigrants or
asylum seekers, e.g. in a story on a Malawian asylum seeker (18 March 2005).
Moreover, there are much more extensive and active accounts of immigrants and
asylum seekers, their conditions and backgrounds and their potential contributions. The Guardian draws on topoi of human rights, ethics, human values,
usefulness and contribution in the positive representation of immigrants and
refugees.
The Daily Mails article headlined White flight grows from the cities divided
by race (11 April 2005) can be taken as an example of negativization of RASIM
in creating a discourse of panic, urgency and battle. As the headline denotes, the
article associates the situation with a quasi-battle of races in which a group of
whites appear as being under attack and are fleeing the field. The out-group is
described to be involved in chain migration which is predicated as a challenge
to the identity of the majority but also implies some kind of mechanical/technical
and thus uncontrollable dynamism.
There is also an ambiguous use of we, where it is not clear if this we who
evaluates the situation as serious and urgent refers to we as the British people
or we as the majority or we as conservatives or an anti-immigration coalition or
we as the journalists and writers of this article. Likewise, most of the propositions of the writer are ambiguously attributed to the report rather than the

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KhosraviNik: The representation of RASIM in the British newspapers

writers views as in the report said . . . , The new evidence . . . , It suggests that
. . . , the Migration watch think-tank, said . . . , It said . . . and so on.
Throughout the article, the ethnic minority members, who are at times narrowed down to Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and, at others, broadened to immigrants
in general (as the numbers and statistics afford), are referred to and talked about
through numbers, figures and percentages (topos of numbers). Overall, the immigrants are constantly referred to in the plural and homogeneous forms.
As for the metaphoric references, the article employs metaphors of size and
quantity (such as container metaphors and natural catastrophe metaphors).
Moreover, the article positions itself in the macro argumentation strategy of war
and confrontation by trying to portray a Manichean picture of race relations in
which there are only two distinct groups, the Asians and us.
The Daily Mails article headlined Immigration and the demonising of
decency (11 April 2005) is another example of an account of RASIM which
taps into populism and scare tactics in a negative presentation of RASIM. There
are several instances of collective generic reference to the vague notions of
people (four cases), they (people) (10 cases), public (three cases), British
(two cases). On the other hand, the immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees are
referred to through collective nominal groups such as numbers: huge numbers
and number of immigrants. Immigrants are de-humanized through the referential
strategy of calling them numbers, entrants and newcomers which are usually
accompanied with excessive quantity attributions like: enormous rise in immigration,
huge numbers, many [immigrants], uncontrolled [number], and unlimited numbers.
There is also the strategy of positive Self presentation by associating the ingroup with moral values, describing the in-group as a beleaguered majority
whose champion, Howard, stands against lies and smears of political correctness,
along with the negative other presentation of the Other as supporting lies
and smears.
He was also signalling to the beleaguered majority that at last they have
a champion who will stand up for mainstream decencies against the lies and
smears of political correctness.
For it touches some of the deepest feelings of the British people about fair play,
bullying and the makeup and orderliness of their country. They know they are
being taken for a ride, and that something of inestimable value is being lost.

The article depicts a panic situation through various much more explicit
strategies such as referential strategy, with immigrants as crisis, uncontrolled,
unlimited, and huge; and predicational strategy, with immigrants threatening
society, changing the face of the country, threatening British values and
the countrys orderliness, being the source of crimes, and having a relation to
terrorism.
The Guardians article headlined Deported from Dorset: The heartrending
case of a Malawian asylum seeker exposes the poisonous hypocrisy of Tory
election tactics (18 March 2005) is an example which employs the strategies
of individualization and humanization in terms of RASIM, as opposed to
general strategies of collectivization and functionalization of the conservative

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broadsheet and the tabloid. The article humanizes the case in point by giving
the full background story. The group supporting the asylum seeker is described
as belonging to a church (positive presentation) supporting a Malawian
woman with four children (humanization) who are against forcible deportation
(negative Other presentation). Further victimization can be seen in accounting
for the personal conditions of Verah (the asylum seeker) through predications as
somebody who has sold everything to join her husband, and someone involved
in voluntary work in a charity shop.
Howards remarks in a TV debate
Howard, appearing on a TV programme, stirred up a lot of discussion on the
subject of RASIM during the general election. The coverage of this event can shed
light on the journalistic mechanisms of manipulation and perspectivization as
well as genre-specific aspects of the data analysed.
The Daily Mails article headlined Howard stands his ground on migrants
during TV grilling (19 April 2005) foregrounds his remarks and propositions in
various ways. The headline may not contain the content of Howards arguments
but contributes to his good quality of standing his ground while it victimizes
him as the person under pressure and attack. This headline is a good example of
perspectivization where the author (or the newspaper) does not distance but
aligns herself/himself with Howard. On the same note, the other social actors
present in the article people who disagree with Howard are predicated as
ambushing him.
Other positive Self presentation through predicational strategy includes
Howards defending his [our or in-group] grounds and standing by his views,
along with negative Other presentation through associating negative or unfair
actions to the out-group social actor, e.g. the opponents are conspirators, people
who attack unfairly, question aggressively, their approach is hostile, they
[presenter] press [Howard] and the attack has been co-ordinated.
There are also populist references to people as major social actors who
think the same as us, that community relations are at risk (victimperpetrator
reversal). The in-group is predicated as being people who are concerned about
community relations and the out-group immigrants are implicitly referred
to as the threat to that.
In the Daily Mails coverage, the in-group social actor, Howard, is quoted
directly most of the time. The other parties who get to be reported directly are
the presenter and a young member of the audience. The presenter who is
represented as an out-group member is quoted directly only when he is asking
a question which is about Howards allegedly prejudiced arguments. In a way,
the question is the argument that Howard and the article intend to put forward,
thus it is quoted directly:
He said: Are you fearful that if there are more newcomers than you think are desirable
that there will be more Burnleys, more Bradfords and more Oldhams? Mr Howard
replied Yes and went on to say: I think people have to have confidence that there
is a proper system of control.

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KhosraviNik: The representation of RASIM in the British newspapers

The second instance of direct quotation is from a member of the audience who
is named as an 18-year-old Dean Delani, who shouts out an extreme expression
and calls Howard racist and xenophobic. Predictably, Howard is given full space
and a direct quotation to reply to this expression.
It is worth noting that in the Daily Mail account, the out-group gets to be
quoted directly only in these two instances which both contribute to the positive
Self presentation and negative Other presentation (they have the same fears
and questions like us in the first case and they are illogical extremists who do
not want things to be debated in the second).
The Times article headlined Howard warns of new race riots (19 April 2005)
adopts a series of strategies in reporting on a TV debate in which Howard directs
his attacks at immigration. It begins by summarizing what he proposes in two
separate quotes: one by the reporter and another by reporting the gist of what
Howard has said.
The Tory leader has raised fears of violence if people lose confidence in immigration
rules, Tosin Sulaiman reports.
Britain faces the threat of race riots if people believe that immigration is out of control,
Michael Howard said last night.

In the first one, fears is used in a nominal form with mystification of the agent,
thus associating it with all peoples fear. Similarly, the process of suppression
and aggregation is seen by the typical use of Britain faces. This can also be
considered as a form of strategic activation which topicalizes the subject of the
sentence, and aggregates whole Britain on the side of us, the conservatives.
There are 10 instances where Howard is using aggregated words such as people,
They (people) and we, which vaguely positions him as speaking for all people
and relating the fears, anxieties and worries of everybody.
When reporting audience protest against Howards proposition, the article
in The Times resorts to a series of backgrounding processes such as passivization
(e.g. The Conservative leader [Howard] was accused of . . . ), using negative
reporting verbs (accuse), negative evaluative adjectives (an angry audience)
and patterns of direct and indirect quoting with a significant difference in
space allocations (e.g. while Howard is accused of pandering to xenophobia, he
defends his position in a direct quote).
The Conservative leader was accused of pandering to xenophobia and hatred
by an angry audience at a TV show. On the first of the ITV1 series Ask the Leaders,
with Jonathan Dimbleby, Mr Howard defended his position of putting immigration
at the centre of his election campaign. I think that immigration is out of control, he
said. It has tripled since Mr Blair came into power.

There are four aggregative references to people and their anxieties, and
immigrants are described as causes of anxiety, stress and a danger to good community relations (topoi of disadvantage and threat) with all these propositions
being reported in direct quoting.
On the other hand, Howard is quoted indirectly for when he employs strategic
hedging in avoiding to directly describe immigrants as violent. Immediately
following that, he is quoted directly when saying:

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we have to be vigilant if we are to make sure we continue to have good community
relations.

In terms of perspectivizing, of the people in the audience who ask questions,

one is predicated as accusing Howard of an extreme and out of context
label, and two are described as being from a specific ethnic minority Gilbert
Barthley, an Afro-Caribbean and another one, Dean Velani, A young Asian man
(18 years old). This is an example of irrelevant information where there is an
unnecessary reference to ethnic backgrounds of people for ideological reasons
(Van Dijk, 1991: 114). Such references here insinuate that these people cannot
afford to keep an unbiased view as they are part of the ethnic minority and their
views are blindly slanted against Howard. Another person asking a question is
referentially described as a disillusioned Tory voter and the last one is described
as Anthony Dunn. In three cases, the reporting verb for their opposition is the
verb accuse and the other one is the verb attack.
Anthony Dunn accused Mr Howard of suggesting that immigrants were bringing
dirty diseases. Mr Howard replied: Controlled immigration is the key to ensuring
Britains security, managing demand on public services and guaranteeing good
community relations.

This article from The Times is an example of how social actors can be foregrounded or backgrounded through (a) linguistic processes of passivization,
activization, nominalization and quoting patterns; (b) argumentation strategies such as topoi of threat, burden, security and disadvantage; and (c) the
schematic distribution of semantic information which predicts the readerships
schematic processes in decoding the information, such as reference to ethnic
backgrounds.
The Guardians article headlined Election 2005: Howard in TV clash over
race and immigration (19 April 2005) does what can be seen as opposite strategies to the conservative accounts. The event which is referred to as a blatant
set up by the Daily Mail is called here a clash over race and immigration in the
headline. It adds to it the element of race to insinuate that the debate involves
issues beyond just immigration and numbers.
Opposite to the account of the Daily Mail, where Howard is depicted as the
victim who is under pressure in a set up where things happen to him, here
Howard is given a general agentive role as the person creating the clash:
Michael Howard last night clashed with members of a TV audience.

His remarks are associated with the cause of the angry response while the
audience is backgrounded as passive participants whose angry reactions are
justifiable because of Howards remarks.
Mr Howards suggestion, on Jonathan Dimblebys Ask the Leaders programme,
drew an angry response from the audience.

In the Daily Mail account, only one remark of the opponent party is mentioned and
quoted. The person is described with his age, and his expression is quoted exactly
when he blames Howard for inciting xenophobic feelings. This reference to the
protests against Howard is singled out and flagged as the only type of reaction.

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KhosraviNik: The representation of RASIM in the British newspapers

The most salient features of positive Self presentation and negative Other
presentation in these three articles, which are on the same event, can be
summarized as:
(a) The patterns of quotations and space allocations in which the in-group
consistently gets both more quotations and space and is reported more
directly.
(b) The strategies of perspectivization which are mostly enacted through
reporting verbs. The out-groups propositions and arguments are usually
provided (if at all) through some filters.
(c) The overall description of the communication event and the provision of
background knowledge, such as Howard being besieged and being in a set
up, Howard causing tension and clashes, or downplaying the coverage as
not a very important issue.

Conclusions
The qualities of ideological negative and positive representation of RASIM
throughout these two periods in British newspapers seem to be linked with the
proximity of these groups of people to the UK (among other contextual differences), and with how dramatic the events described are. These two elements
are cumulatively present in period one (Kosovo refugees) during which there
was a generally supportive, positive presentation of affected people in all the
newspapers accounts.
The impact of political rivalry discourse on the representation of RASIM
is an important factor to be considered. As immigration constitutes to be a
core topic in British politics, RASIM tend to be automatically backgrounded in
significant ways throughout almost all debates, even in the liberal newspapers.
Such backgrounding mechanisms are mainly taken for granted semantically
and pragmatically, along with references to numbers and percentages.
In terms of differences between the conservative broadsheet, The Times, and
the tabloid, the Daily Mail, it can be argued that the Daily Mail generally perpetuates the existing known stereotypes and thus reproduces negative attitudes
(potentially) existing among its readership, whereas The Times is more creative
and refrains from reproducing the stereotypes explicitly. Hence, in terms of
prejudiced negative presentation of RASIM, the Daily Mail harvests and reflects
the existing prejudices while The Times creates and introduces newer versions
(KhosraviNik, 2009).
Conservative accounts of RASIM (both in The Times and the Daily Mail) hardly
recognize these groups using their names or other qualities, unless they can be
positioned inside or adjacent to one of the negative topoi available, e.g. violence.
Liberal news reporters do make more of an effort to recognize diversities and
draw on topoi of human rights, ethics and human values.
The study also shows that the negative representation of RASIM in the
British press in the events relevant to the UK (i.e. 2005 elections) mainly draws
on a series of common topoi including numbers, threat (threat to cultural

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identity, threat to community values) and danger. At the same time, RASIM
are systematically constructed as a homogeneous group, sharing similar characteristics, backgrounds, motivations and economic status through processes of
aggregation, collectivization and functionalization. Aggregation is not restricted
to the pluralization of RASIM linguistically in the agent or patient positions of
the sentences, but it can be pragmatically communicated through common
political discourses dealing with the issue of RASIM.
The genre-specific features of the data (i.e. newspaper articles) prove to
be salient micro-linguistic mechanisms through which perspectivization in
representation of RASIM is achieved and reflected. Journalistic features like
the order of information, agenda setting, exaggeration, extensivization/summarization and space allocation in general, and quotation patterns in particular,
play an important role in constructing and reproducing these particular
perspectives.
In terms of the link between macro-structures ideologies and microlinguistic structures, e.g. metaphors of large quantities, the study shows that
such a link does not constitute a one-to-one correlation. The process of interpretation of micro mechanisms, such as linguistic foregrounding/backgrounding
in the first period (Kosovo refugees), essentially depends on the macro schema
at work, and it is within this framework that the incorporation of metaphors
linking refugees with natural disasters do not constitute a negative representation
in that case. Rather, it seems that the topos of numbers and quantity work in
favour of the refugees and victims as it denotes a call for the urgent need of help
and support.
That is to conclude that the topoi of numbers and large quantities or in fact
(with some reservation) any other linguistic micro structures do not constitute
negativity by themselves. Negativity is an aspect of the macro-structure of
interpretation of a discourse, rather than being an inherent feature of microlinguistic categories. The interpretation of negativity requires a complex
contextual sense-making apparatus which would include in itself (inter-)
discursive topics among several other relevant physical, emotional elements
which constitute a context of interpretation. However, when such a context is
shared, communicating negativity can fly in the most covert ways and
hence it can be deeply coded. This tacit, shared macro-structure orients,
regulates and provides keys to decode the meanings at the micro-linguistic
level. Hence, meanings reside within the society and social context, rather than
the language.
N OTE S

1. See Figure 1 on the increasing number of British newspaper articles on/about immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers between 1996 and 2006.
2. See Van Dijk (1996) for the role of access in defining the power of groups.
3. See Wodak and Meyer (2009: 22) for a systematization of various CDA approaches
in this regard.

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KhosraviNik: The representation of RASIM in the British newspapers

4. For CDA studies on anti-Semitism and anti foreigners discourses in an Austrian
context, see Wodak (1990, 1994, 1997); Mitten (1992); Wodak and Matouschek
(1993); Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999); and Reisigl and Wodak (2001). On the
representation of RASIM in a British context, see Hartmann and Husband (1974);
Van Dijk (1987, 1991); Lynn and Lea (2003); Jones (2006); and KhosraviNik
(2009). See Van Dijk (1987) for discriminatory discourses in a Dutch context and
Van Dijk (2005) in the context of Spain and Latin America. On the role of language
in asylum application procedures in Belgium, see Blommaert (2001). For a study
of the French parliamentary discourses on immigration and nationality, see Van
der Valk (2006). For an investigation of extreme negative representation of the
Romani community in Romania, see Tileaga (2005), and see Pietikainen (2003) for
the representation of the aboriginal Sami community in Finland. For research in a
Hong Kong context and a representation of immigrant Chinese, see Flowerdew and
Tran (2002). On racism in the USA, see Santa Ana (1999) and on representation of
native New Zealanders, see Wetherell and Potter (1992). Finally, for research on
discursive dimensions of the representation of immigrants in Australia, see Teo
(2000); Malcolm and Sharifian (2002); and Clyne (2005).
5. Reisigl and Wodak (2001) define topoi as parts of argumentation which belong
to the obligatory, either explicit or inferable premises. Topoi are the content-related
warrants or conclusion rules which connect the argument or arguments with
the conclusion, the claim. As such, they justify (a shortcut) transition from the
argument or arguments to the conclusion. Topoi are central to categorizations of
seemingly convincing arguments which are widely adopted in prejudice discourse
on out-groups.
6. See Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press, 19962006, ESRCfunded project carried out in 20067 at the Department of Linguistics and English
Language, Lancaster University. For more information, please see http://www.ling.
lancs.ac.uk/activities/285/
7. Adapted from Gabrielatos and Baker (2008).
8. See Gabrielatos (2007) for query terms used in the data collection of the project.
9. The author appreciates the contributions of Dr Micha Krzyanowski in the design
of the down-sampling procedure.
10. It should be noted that, at this point, the actual reading of the content of the articles
was carried out and hence the study engages in actual qualitative analysis as of this
stage, i.e. the analysis of discourse topics.
11. See KhosraviNik (under review) for the role of perspectivization in the representation
of in- and out-groups.
12. By strategies we generally mean a more or less intentional plan of practices
(including discursive practices) adopted to achieve a particular social, political,
psychological or linguistic goal. Discursive strategies are located at different levels
of linguistic organization and complexity (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009: 13).
13. An attempt has been made to systematize CDA methods in studies on representation
of social actors which incorporates analytical models of DHA, in Van Dijk and Van
Leeuwen (KhosraviNik, under review).
14. Scorgie, drawing on Abrahams (2000), maintains that the brutal policy of ethniccleansing [had] by the end of the seventy-eight day war . . . resulted in 850,000
ethnic Albanian refugees, between 300,000 and 400,000 internally displaced people
within Kosovo, and approximately 10,000 killed (2004: 289).
15. Using the term positive referring to discourses on/about RASIM seems to be
essentially problematic. Quite a number of topoi which could be labelled as positive

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by some, e.g. discourses of humanitarianism, responsibility and ethical values,
can be classificatory and/or exclusionary. Although such discourses are not essentially negative, they can be used to perpetuate an us versus them divide in a
different way.
16. The topic analysis is based on one month of the data during the two periods.
17. Topos of numbers is usually used in a syllogism of communicating a negative
conclusion rule: the higher the number, the worse the event, e.g. the flood of
foreigners is paralysing our towns. However, the references to large numbers and
quantities in this particular event point to a different (or opposite) conclusion rule,
i.e. the severity of the humanitarian crisis and the need to help. Investigating the
mechanisms of such differences in conclusion rules can be an interesting topic for
further research.
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Clearly Tell just by Looking: Critical Discourse Analysis and the Study of Neo-racism
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Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (2009, forthcoming) Critical Discourse Analysis: History,
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Discourse Analysis, 2nd edn. London: SAGE.

M A J I D K H O S R AV I N I K is a research associate and teaching assistant in the Linguistics and

English Language department at Lancaster University. He is working towards a PhD on
critical discourse analysis and discursive strategies of self and other representation in
news discourses. Majid has been involved in discourse analytical studies in the context of
Iran, including a CDA analysis of political ideologies in Iranian newspapers. His research
interests include: critical discourse analysis, its theory and methodology, discourse and
discrimination, discourse and politics, language and identity, language and gender, and
language policy. See http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/profiles/Majid-KhosraviNik. A D D R E S S :
Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, LA1 4YT, UK.
[email: m.khosravinik@lancaster.ac.uk]

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