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Experts in different fields have claimed that the UK has experienced a process of growing economic inequality since the 1970s. Following Fairclough's dialectal-relational approach, this paper presents a detailed, systematic analysis of the representation of homeless people and homelessness in "The Guardian" and "Daily Mail" from 2000 to 2018, in order to explore how these have been discursively represented over time. Therefore, our study addresses two specific research questions: How have homelessness and homeless people been represented in the UK press? Are there any discoursal changes in representation with the passing of time? The analysis, which has employed mostly qualitative but also quantitative (statistical) methods drawing on corpus-assisted discourse analysis, is informed by the theory of TRANSITIVITY within Systemic Functional Linguistics. Results indicate that, within an overall negative representation of homeless people and homelessness in this period, there have been some significant discoursal changes over time. As such, this paper contributes to critical discourse studies and transitivity research on a relevant social problem, that of growing economic inequality in the UK.

Local journalism in the UK has been described as being in "crisis". Local newspapers have experienced years of declining circulations and staff cuts, leading to questions about how effectively those institutions can continue to perform normative functions of journalism. One of those is to report on the courts. Through analysis of 22 semi-structured interviews with local newspaper reporters who cover the courts beat, agency court reporters who supply the local press, as well as broadcast journalists involved in both local and national court coverage, this paper helps to establish how the daily newswork of court journalists has developed amid a turbulent period in journalism, especially local journalism. The research finds that court reporting has been less affected than other news beats but faces a series of challenges related to financial cuts and other pressures. While the local press has become even more essential to the provision of court reporting, a central part of the news media's fourth estate role, those challenges affect the ability of court reporters to perform this function. This paper recommends that policymakers consider using a form of public funding to guarantee the future of court reporting at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies a historical linguistic approach to compare specific word choice before, during and after the First World War in a sample of UK newspapers and two Nottingham papers. It finds that language use in Nottingham newspapers was similar to UK papers but at the same time showed marked differences, possibly as a result of local characteristics, circumstances, events and developments, which suggests that people's experience of war in this city did not always follow an overall UK pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the United Kingdom's referendum on European Union (EU) membership in 2016, a new political cleavage of Remainers and Leavers has developed (Kelley, N. [2019]. British social attitudes survey: Britain's shifting identities and attitudes. (36). National Centre for Research). This paper explores how five pro-Brexit newspapers discursively construct political division in Britain in relation to two key events in the final year of Britain's EU membership: the extension of the withdrawal process past the original date of March, and the introduction of the Benn Act in September. The paper reveals two primary discursive constructions of division in Britain: a divide between incompetent and arrogant political officials and an innocent, suffering public, and an identity cleavage between pro-Remain 'elites' and 'ordinary' Leave-voting citizens. The study argues that the construction of these divisions threatens a collective national identity in Britain at a time when it is most required. It concludes that by apportioning blame for socio-political divisions, the newspapers obfuscate their role in contributing to disunity in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the print strategies of Britain's first Black editor, S. J. Celestine Edwards (1857?–1894), during his tenure at the antiracist journal, Fraternity. I show how Edwards capitalized on "scissors-and-paste" methods to articulate connections between minoritizing processes in British colonies and the US, thus formulating a theory of Anglo-Saxonism as a power relation reproduced across empires. Via the pages of Fraternity, Edwards reassembled this inter-imperial formation as an antiracist one, relying on reprints from the African American and British colonial press. Building on Caroline Bressey, I argue that Edwards extended the journal's function as a "relay station" for the colonial and African American press to his readers, whom he charged with memorizing and ventriloquizing Fraternity, and hailed as walking, talking issues of his paper. His directives to recirculate already reprinted texts inducted readers into an imagined community whose membership refracted across multiple publications rather than centered on one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how transgender identity is represented across articles from three British national newspapers: The Guardian, The Times and The Telegraph. Transgender identity has become a highly contentious issue in areas of western culture, especially Britain, and even within feminism itself, with heightened visibility leading to a backlash against the rights of trans people to protection, and even recognition, in law. However, the influence of the broadsheets, Britain's so-called "quality" newspapers, in shaping the debate over transgender rights is under-researched. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (Michelle), I assess how the above newspapers position transgender subjects to alternatively legitimize or "other" transgender identity. Despite polarisation on issues of trans rights between newspapers, this paper finds that both "pro-trans" and "anti-trans" articles appropriate a feminist lexicon to define womanhood and gender in ways that justify their stance and foster division within wider society. I conclude that (white, cisheteronormative) feminism has become a vehicle for mainstream news media to further political agendas that can be crudely cast as either "progressive" or "conservative". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthcare on both sides of the Atlantic is a highly charged political and economic subject. This work considers US media coverage of the UK's National Health Service (NHS), an under-researched area. We assess the framing of the NHS in editorials, opinion and feature articles during the time of the Obama administration to show how media can perform the role of lesson-drawing, a theory adopted from public policy research. The study also applies the notion of journalistic habitus in this context. Using these ideas, we address a hypothesis which holds that US coverage is framed around the flaws of the UK's NHS. The paper considers how intermedia editorial and news values operate, with commentators drawing a range of negative lessons in both the Democrat- and Republican-supporting press. We find that the NHS was often posited as a flawed international variant of the single-payer model, where newspapers employed an ahistoric explanation of failure and decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reporting on crime and the courts are among the classic functions of journalism. In the UK, journalists and others must abide by the Contempt of Court Act 1981, the main piece of primary legislation aimed at ensuring coverage of legal matters is fair to the participants. The restrictions are generally tighter in practice than in jurisdictions such as the US, where the media has a much freer hand to engage in pre-trial reporting. This paper argues that media coverage of the arrest of the so-called 'Yorkshire Ripper' serial killer, Peter Sutcliffe, in 1981 while Parliament was considering the question of contempt, has made the UK regime tougher than it might otherwise have been. Excessive reporting was influenced by an unusually celebratory police news conference. This news coverage coloured the contemporary debate around contempt, and any opportunity for a more relaxed approach to contempt in the UK's jurisdictions was lost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first edition of the Daily Mail on May 4, 1896, included an advertisement for the "latest scientific marvel," the Lumiere Cinematograph. While historians have acknowledged the concurrent rise of film and the popular press, this article explores the varied and often-innovative ways in which British newspapers produced film and visual media. From the use of Daily Mail screens to relay election results, to the production and promotion of the newspaper's own film in 1910, these early interactions allow us to understand better the emergence, evolution, and endurance of Britain's modern media system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Election coverage is often assumed to be different to everyday political coverage. We argue that this depends on political institutions. In majoritarian countries, where elections choose governments, election coverage should decisively move towards political competition and away from policy. In consensual countries, where coalitions are based on policy negotiations, there should be a less pronounced shift towards political competition and away from policy. To test this argument, we use an automatic coding system to study 0.9 billion words in Die Welt for 12 years and in the Financial Times for 30 years. The results support our institutional hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While attention has been given to understanding support for the far‐right, there is a lack of focus on the way in which a threat of the far‐right can be used for political ends. This paper addresses this using the UK Brexit debate as an illustration. The question therefore is: What is talk about the far‐right used to do in discussions about Brexit? A discursive psychological approach addresses a sample of newspaper reports containing both 'Far‐Right' and 'Brexit', from the first quarter of 2019 (n = 45). The analysis identifies a range of uses of talk about the far‐right: (1) An opponent of Brexit is called a Nazi by pro‐Brexit protesters, who are labelled far‐right; (2) A lack of Brexit is presented as fuel for the far‐right; (3) Remain supporters reject the idea that a lack of Brexit fuels the far‐right; (4) A link with the far‐right is rejected by a prominent Brexit supporter; and (5) Support for Brexit is again linked with the far‐right. The far‐right can be used as a strategic tool by opposing sides of the Brexit debate and – significantly – the supposed threat of the far‐right can be used to placate far‐right ideas, rather than to genuinely challenge them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examined representations of medicinal cannabis users in UK newspapers, 1990–1998. It is important to understand the significance of these newspaper articles during this early stage of the growing cultural normalisation of medicinal cannabis use, in the UK, which is not documented in the existing literature. This is a very different period in relation to access to information for members of the public because it was before the widespread use of the internet. The significance of these dates is also that I started interviewing medicinal cannabis users in 1998, which led to Coomber et al. (2003). Very significantly, almost half of the participants in that article indicated that newspapers were the source of the idea that cannabis was medicinally useful and that this accounted for why they began to use it medicinally. What was in those newspaper articles that encouraged this view? In the current article, I examined 60 newspaper articles about medicinal cannabis use, using a thematic analysis which also draws on aspects of critical discourse analysis. I report on the process of symbolic boundary work which negotiates the ambiguity of individuals portrayed as social insiders but who used cannabis. The representations within the articles emphasized the social insider characteristics of medicinal cannabis users, emphasized their genuine illnesses/impairments, but interestingly also articulated misunderstandings by the journalists which contributed to a positive portrayal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines UK newspaper coverage during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic March-August 2020. A qualitative framing analysis of public messaging on age in five high circulation newspapers provides a detailed account of who is deemed to be at risk of dying from COVID-19. Newspapers represent older people as most at risk, with disability as a secondary factor. Reports on who is responsible, who is at risk, and who is to blame for deaths from COVID-19 are framed as issues of public health and generational fairness, with individual responsibility occupying a prominent role. We also find two counter-frames. First, in letters to the editor, older people's pleas for freedom are framed as a fight for their civil liberties. Second, newspapers praise 99-year-old Captain Tom Moore and frame his behaviour as a source of national pride. We identify this as positive ageism. We conclude that reporting across progressive and conservative newspapers reflects age-based stereotypes and paternalism towards older people. Public figures are represented as scapegoats or heroes, offering distraction from the less newsworthy fact that long-term under-investment in social care increased the risk of dying amongst the old and disabled during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the function of data journalism in a UK newsroom using Bourdieu's field theory. The collection of study data was conducted through in-depth interviews, utilising a qualitative research methodology. The data obtained revealed that data journalism, a sub-field of journalism, continues to develop in an interdisciplinary structure and creates a new type of habitus (data habitus) within the field of journalism. This study also shows that the data journalism team in the newspaper has moved from being niche to being established as one of the most active and effective main sections of the newsroom, and that data-driven journalism has the potential to influence other teams. Lastly, this study suggested that the newsroom is undergoing a process of datafication by indicating the newspaper's intention to develop data skills beyond the data journalism team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like most English press reports on the first partition of Poland, the author of an opinion piece from 1773, published in the Public Advertiser under the pseudonym "Tullius", believed that of the three powers dividing Poland, the Prussian interest could be the most dangerous both for the national interest of Britain and for the future of the European balance of power. It is significant that in almost all cases where the interests of Britain and the question of intervention were invoked in English opinion pieces, the defence of the continent's political balance appeared as a strong argument. Through a critical discourse analysis of relevant opinion pieces published in London newspapers between 1771 and 1774, I point out how the authors used similar or different balance-of-power rhetoric, while occasionally deeper, polemical balance-of-power discourse to reflect their views. I illustrate that the authors of these articles have applied the concept essentially in relation to the following three themes: (1) the "diabolical alliance" of the partitioning powers, (2) the issue of British intervention, and (3) the criticism of the idle British government. One of the main conclusions of my analysis is that the balance-of-power discourse is most prominent in relation to the third issue, sometimes even leading to a general questioning of the legitimacy of the contemporary balance-of-power policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For several years just before the First World War, a columnist called 'Art Flann' was a regular contributor to northern Irish provincial newspapers including the Strabane Chronicle and Ulster Herald. Erudite, argumentative, often satirical, he was also invariably -- as a later Flann O'Brien (or Myles na gCopaleen) would have said -- sound on the national question. He wrote on a wide range of subjects, including education, the courts, the Orange Order, and the coming of Home Rule, but a common thread was the misgovernment of Ireland as part of the UK. The pseudonym's career lasted from about 1908 to 1914, ending just as the future Flann O'Brien (then an infant) and a fast-expanding O'Nolan family moved from Strabane to Dublin. This note considers the possibility that Michael Victor O'Nolan, then crown servant and home-schooling patriarch of the O'Nolan clan, was the man behind the nom de plume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Press representations of autism and autistic people both reflect and help shape public attitudes towards autism and neurodiversity and may establish critical barriers to social integration for autistic individuals. This study examined such representations in UK newspapers in the period 2011–2020 using a corpus-based approach. It also considered how press representations changed over time and differed with regard to reporting style (tabloids vs broadsheets) and political orientation (left- vs right-leaning). We created the Autism UK Press Corpus, which included all documents (~24K) referring to autism in 10 national newspapers. We used document counts (normalised by newspaper size) to assess the 'newsworthiness' of autism. We also employed a synergy of corpus-based and critical-discourse-analysis methodologies to study lexicogrammatical patterns and uncover explicit and implicit attitudes towards autism. Our results showed that the coverage of autism increased slightly over time, especially in broadsheets and left-leaning newspapers. Newspapers emphasised adversities associated with autism, often used negative language, and tended to focus on boys. These representations shifted gradually towards more difference-based descriptions and included more diverse age/gender groups, especially in broadsheets and left-leaning newspapers. We discuss the broad implications of these findings for the autism community and those interested in a more inclusive society. Any thriving society must recognise, accept and celebrate all of its diverse talent. But how accepting is British society towards autism and autistic people? This research addressed this question through the lens of the press since the press both reflects and helps shape public attitudes towards various social categories. We used specialised 'corpus-based' methods to carry out a large-scale study, which examined all articles referring to autism or autistic people in 10 national British newspapers in the period 2011–2020. We first investigated how often newspapers referred to autism. We found that the coverage of autism increased slightly over the years, suggesting that autism was becoming an increasingly newsworthy topic. Furthermore, the rise in autism coverage differed considerably between individual newspapers: it was more pronounced in the broadsheets than tabloids, and in left-leaning than right-leaning newspapers. But what was the focus of these articles? We found that newspapers emphasised the adversities associated with autism and portrayed autism with a lot of negative language. Newspapers also tended to focus on autistic children, and particularly on boys. There were some signs of change in more recent years, with some newspapers now representing autism as a difference and, in addition, referring to more diverse groups of autistic people. However, these changes tended to be confined to broadsheets and left-leaning newspapers. Our findings suggest that representations of autism in the contemporary British press are skewed towards stereotypically negative views, which may well hinder the acceptance of autism and the fostering of a more inclusive society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media can be a powerful communication tool to promote breastfeeding, influence mothers' breastfeeding behaviour, create positive social norms and generate support among stakeholders and policymakers for breastfeeding. However, negative stories could deter women from starting or continuing to breastfeed. This study aimed to describe the breadth and focus of the media coverage of breastfeeding and the message frames that are found in three of the most widely read national newspapers and three popular women's magazines in Great Britain over a 12‐month period, as part of the Becoming Breastfeeding Friendly in Great Britain (BBF‐GB) study. For this retrospective media analysis, 77 articles were identified and 42 were included in the study for coding and analysis. We conducted two content analyses to examine the articles' (1) message framing and (2) alignment with the eight components of an 'enabling breastfeeding environment' using the BBF Gear framework. Articles featuring breastfeeding appear in British newspapers and women's magazines all year round. Twenty‐four per cent had a neutral tone, while 59% predominantly focused on the positive aspects or positive social support for breastfeeding, and 17% were predominantly focused on the negative aspects or negative social attitudes towards breastfeeding. The articles mainly focused on personal stories reflecting societal barriers and positive shifts (68%), with 12% presenting an analysis of breastfeeding evidence or barriers. There were fewer references to the legislation (5%) and availability of funding (2%) and support (9%). There was no coverage of national coordination and strategy, evaluation systems, or the political will to raise breastfeeding rates. Key messages: During the one‐year study period, articles featuring breastfeeding appeared in the included British newspapers and women's magazines all year round rather than being focused on specific events, such as World Breastfeeding Week.Articles mainly focused on personal stories and were initiated by social media posts or discussions on television by mothers, often celebrity mothers.While articles discussed the difficulties mothers face during breastfeeding, they also detailed positive support for breastfeeding, presenting a more balanced view.The articles did not fully reflect BBF's Gear Model components for an enabling breastfeeding environment. Most were categorised as promotion articles with fewer advocacy pieces. There was little coverage of legislation, services and funding while political support, breastfeeding data and strategic oversight were not covered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores discursive constructions of women trafficked for sexual exploitation in newspaper articles in the United Kingdom and the United States. I draw on the results of a multimodal discourse analysis of 25 articles published in 2018 across seven newspapers. The framework of politics of pity is used to analyze the politics of representation of trafficked women. The analysis yields six categories that fall into two themes: Agency is depicted through trafficked women as deceased, controlled, and injured subjects, and visibility through the categories of strangers, victims, and survivors. These ways of appearance suggest that, in newspaper content, trafficked women are placed on a hierarchy of victimhood. Appeals to compassionate care are reserved for "ideal victims," while those lower on the hierarchy are construed as ambivalent subjects lacking a political voice. The study shows that dominant constructions of public suffering reflect a neo-abolitionist politics of representation, while marginalized identities and subjectivities are framed through ambivalence. To expand the remit of care, ambivalence could be productively used to contextualize social oppression in media accounts of human trafficking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Following a large-scale, pandemic-driven shift to remote consulting in UK general practice in 2020, 2021 saw a partial return to in-person consultations. This occurred in the context of extreme workload pressures because of backlogs, staff shortages, and task shifting. Aim: To study media depictions of remote consultations in UK general practice at a time of system stress. Design and setting: Thematic analysis of national newspaper articles about remote GP consultations from two time periods: 13–26 May 2021, following an NHS England letter, and 14–27 October 2021, following a government-backed directive, both stipulating a return to in-person consulting. Method: Articles were identified through, and retrieved from, LexisNexis. A coding system of themes and narrative devices was developed iteratively to inform data analysis. Results: In total, 25 articles reported on the letter and 75 on the directive. Newspaper coverage of remote consulting was strikingly negative. The right-leaning press in particular praised the return to in-person consultations, depicting remote care as creating access barriers and compromising safety. Two newspapers led national campaigns pressuring the government to require GPs to offer in-person consultations. GPs were quoted as reluctant to return to an 'in-person by default' service (as it would further pressurise a system already close to breaking point). Conclusion: Remote consultations have become associated in the media with poor practice. Some newspapers were actively leading the 'war' on general practice rather than merely reporting on it. Proactive dialogue between practitioners and the media might help minimise polarisation and improve perceptions around general practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the representation of tabloid journalists in 1930s British cinema. It argues that during this period, British films showed journalists to be collaborating with state powers to maintain a stable society. They also depicted reporters as not adhering to any recognised ethical framework. As a result, cinematic journalists in 1930s Britain differ markedly from later, better-known fictional reporters, as they do not challenge inequalities or uphold principles of ethics. The 1930s saw the consolidation and expansion of the popular press in Britain, as well as a boom in cinemagoing. The depiction of the relatively novel 'type' of the tabloid reporter in fiction films in this period therefore had the potential to greatly impact the public's view of the journalism profession. The article highlights how this under-researched period in British film history gives important indications of the place of the reporter in the country's popular imagination, in this decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Information about how newspapers portray antidiabetic medicines to readers is lacking. This study investigated the reporting on antidiabetic medicines in the most widely circulated newspapers published in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) over a 10-year period. Methods: The Nexis UK database was used to identify and select relevant articles. Systematic content analysis of the articles which met the inclusion criteria (articles of any format that contained reference to antidiabetic medicines) within the highest circulated newspapers in the UK and US between 2009 and 2018 was conducted. Inter-rater reliability of coding was established using a 10% sample of the identified articles. Results: A total of 560 (369 UK and 191 US) relevant newspaper articles were retrieved. In the UK, the number of relevant articles showed a slightly increasing trend over the study period, while in the US, article numbers declined over the study period. Safety/risk of antidiabetic medicines was the most frequent theme covered by the articles (34.6%). Over one-third of the newspaper articles were written from a clinical perspective (37.7%). Insulin was the most commonly discussed class of antidiabetic medicine (23.1%). Control of blood sugar levels (53.1%) and side effects/toxicity (92.7%) were the most frequently reported benefit and risk of antidiabetic medicines, respectively. The most frequently reported organ systems harmed by antidiabetic medicines were the cardiovascular, endocrine and gastrointestinal systems. The UK newspapers were more likely to report the benefits of antidiabetic medicines (p = 0.005), while the US articles were more likely to report on harms/risks (p = 0.001). The majority of relevant articles (91.8%) were judged as having a balanced judgement, while 8.2% of the articles were rated as exaggerated. Conclusions: This study has revealed that antidiabetic medicines are indeed reported on by UK and US newspapers. As media portrayal has the potential to negatively or positively influence patients' views of their medication for diabetes, healthcare professionals should check on patients' beliefs and knowledge about their medication and proactively provide objective and balanced information (including promotion of medication adherence). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since its incorporation in UK law, the European Convention on Human Rights has attracted hostile press reporting. This study examines how the Human Rights Act, the Convention's UK domestic equivalent, is represented in newspapers in the devolved nations. Its main finding is that, over time, the press there has become more supportive of the Act, deviating from the editorial line adopted by many English national titles. European human rights act as a conduit of the devolved nations' belonging as European nations, making it a potentially important issue in the re-imagining of national identity in the era of devolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media representations can have significant influence in shaping opinions and influence public response to certain communities or gender and ethnic representations around the world. Investigating semiotic representation in linguistic discourse as vehicles for meaning in culture has been a fruitful area of research over the past decades. This study explores how stereotypes of women feed into the representations of Saudi women in contemporary press in Britain and Saudi Arabia. The focus is on the newspaper genre. Data for this study have been gleaned from a particular set of British and Saudi newspapers. Using the Color Image Scale (CIS) as a research tool, this study yielded a number of findings, the main one of which is the discrepancy in Saudi women's representation in the journalistic discourse under study. In addition, variances in color choice and usage between the newspapers in the present study were apparent. The study provides an important opportunity to advance our understanding of Saudi women's representation in British versus Saudi newspapers. The present study also makes a major contribution to research on critical discourse analysis by demonstrating how power as well as orientalism impact Saudi women's representation. The findings of this study are important for scholars of gender, religion, media, and cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has indicated that social workers are portrayed negatively in the UK press, particularly in child protection cases. But what is the nature of this negativity? And are social workers also mentioned in more positive contexts? To explore these questions, a collection of three months of newspaper articles was compiled (early May to early August 2019), using the seed term 'social worker(s)'. Almost 1,000 occurrences were located and categorised as 'positive' (6 per cent of instances), 'negative' (25 per cent) or 'neutral' (69 per cent). Further classification of negative instances indicates these concern social workers' perceived failure to act rather than perceived over-zealous behaviour (ratio 5:2). Findings also suggest that the press tend to hold social workers to a higher moral standard in their everyday lives than is the case for other members of society. Understanding how social workers are portrayed in the press is important for practitioners in terms of recruitment, job satisfaction and retention. In addition, as newspapers are the major source of information on social work for members of the public, greater awareness could reduce the societal tendency towards finding individuals to blame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: It is well-established that media influences public perceptions, and that media coverage of psychiatry is negative compared to the rest of medicine. No studies that we know of, have compared media reporting on antidepressants and talking therapies as treatments for depression. We hypothesised that coverage of antidepressants would be more negative than that of psychotherapies in both headlines and articles. Methods: We identified online articles in The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Daily Express, and The Guardian between 11 June 2013 and 11 June 2018. Two raters independently evaluated their titles/content with regard to their portrayal of antidepressants and psychotherapies (positive/negative/neutral), with good inter-rater reliability. Results: We identified 221 articles. Antidepressants featured in 184 articles, of which 27 (15%) portrayed them positively, 68 (37%) negatively, and 89 (48%) neutrally; and 173 headlines, of which 24 (14%) portrayed them positively, 64 (37%) negatively, and 85 (49%) neutrally. Antidepressants received more coverage than psychotherapy, which featured in 132 articles, of which 48 (36%) portrayed them positively, 3 (2%) negatively, and 81 (61%) neutrally; and 53 headlines, of which 16 (30%) portrayed them positively, 2 (4%) negatively, and 35 (66%) neutrally. A Fisher's exact test revealed a statistically significant difference between the portrayal of antidepressants and psychotherapies in both articles (p = 2.86 × 10−15) and headlines (p = 2.79 × 10−6). Conclusion: Despite the two treatments being similarly effective, the portrayal of antidepressants in the UK online media is more negative than that of psychotherapy. This could potentially discourage patients from considering taking antidepressants, and provoke patients currently taking antidepressants to stop abruptly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our research explored the social representations of the 'vegetative state' across different cultural (India, Italy, and the UK) and social milieus (left‐leaning, right‐leaning, and religious/tabloid newspapers). The aim was to discover how public discourse engages liminality between life and death. Qualitative and quantitative text analyses were conducted on news headlines and full‐texts from British (n = 300), Indian (n = 300), and Italian (n = 300) newspapers published between January 1990 and June 2019. Our study shows three results: (a) the vegetative state is a potentially global issue that remains discussed with local timing and characteristics; (b) it is commonly represented in eight frames of different resonance across cultural milieus; (c) the news flows are organised on different dimensions (quality, political, and ideological). Results shed light on how liminality is discursively managed by the interplay of cultural resources and social positionings. In particular, this suggests a hitherto unrecognised function of the objectification process: personification as position‐taking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the historical context of the development and modernization of the press, of an increasingly intense transnational circulation of ideas and of editorial styles, this essay sets out to analyze the reasons why reading rooms specialized in the foreign-language press, especially in English—for which the market was narrow—were successful in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century. It examines the consequences of the circulation of the normally difficult to access British periodicals and newspapers, such as the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review and the Westminster Review present in these reading rooms, on the transformation of the French media system. In the 1850s and 1860s, the wind started to change direction. By then, on the other side of the Channel, Alexander Macmillan and Mathew Arnold had become fervent admirers of the famous Revue des deux mondes. This turnabout testifies to the complexity of the mechanisms at work behind transnational cultural transfers and media innovation in France and in Britain at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Amidst the financial crisis affecting UK newspapers, one area of optimism is their online overseas audiences. These foreign visitors often outnumber their domestic equivalents, and some newspapers have made the 'long-distance' market a key component of their commercial strategies. Overseas news audiences are, however, under-researched, an omission this study aims to help remedy via an investigation into the audiences for 7 UK newspaper brands (and a public-service broadcaster) across 10 countries using data from a leading source of Internet audience measurement, Comscore. The study uses an innovative, multidimensional model (derived from work by Zheng et al.) to analyse audience engagement across the dimensions of visibility, popularity, depth, loyalty and stickiness. The results reveal that there are significant differences in how audiences behave from country to country, dependent on language and culture. The study has implications for how news organizations serve their overseas audiences and suggests new directions for research into audiences for globalized online journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The press' representation of mental illness often includes images of people as dangerous, and there is evidence that this contributes to stigmatising understandings about mental illness. Little is known about how newspapers portray mental health on their Twitter feeds. To explore the representation of mental health in the UK national press' Twitter feeds. Content analysis was used to code the Tweets produced by UK national press in two time periods, 2014 and 2017. Chi-square analysis was used to identify trends. The analysis identified a significant reduction in the proportion of tweets that were characterised as Bad News between 2014 and 2017 (χ2 = 14.476, d.f.=1, p < 0.001) and a significant increase in the tweets characterised as Understanding (χ2 = 9.398, d.f.=1, p = 0.002). However, in 2017, 24% of the tweets were still characterised as Bad News. Readers did not retweet Bad News stories significantly more frequently than they were produced. There is a positive direction of travel in the representations of mental health in the Twitter feeds of the UK press, but the level of Bad News stories remains a concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and aims: Opening up access to scheduled drugs such as cannabis in the United Kingdom rarely happens, yet on 1 November 2018 the United Kingdom changed the law to allow cannabis‐derived products to be prescribed for medicinal purposes, albeit in tightly controlled circumstances. This followed substantial media interest in the cases of two children with epilepsy. This article focuses upon the role of scandal in bringing about legislative change. Methods: We used political science and social policy theories (punctuated equilibrium theory and scandal theory) to guide a qualitative content analysis of media articles published in 2018 in UK national newspapers. We focused in particular on the 6‐month period prior to the policy change. Results: The concentrated attention by the media given to the suffering of children with epilepsy appears to have prompted the rapid change in policy by the UK government. A variety of strategies were used to develop a highly emotive response to garner support for reform. Media stories emphasized the injustice of two extremely sick children being unable to access the medicine they apparently needed to enable them to have a 'normal' childhood. Three groups of 'claim‐makers' were identified as important in influencing public opinion: families, high‐profile individuals and campaigning groups. Conclusions: The case of medicinal cannabis in the United Kingdom suggests that policy reform can occur when a scandal is successfully manufactured. We must be cautious, however, about over‐emphasizing the role of scandal as a driver of policy change in this context: only a limited set of circumstances will permit a prescription for cannabis‐based medicine to be issued in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change will rob future generations—today's children and those yet to be born—of the stable climate that previous generations have enjoyed. The article explores how future generations are represented in climate change coverage in the UK national press. We examine the 'popular' (Mail, Mirror) and 'quality' (Guardian, Telegraph) press from 2010 to March 2019. We found that little attention was given to future generations; young people rarely spoke and, along with those yet to be born, were represented in ways that obscured the temporal and social inequalities that are built into climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educating the public about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is considered a key part of an optimal public health response. In both media depictions and policy discourses around health risks, how a problem is framed underpins public awareness and understanding, while also guiding opinions on what actions can and should be taken. Using a mixed methods approach we analyse newspaper content in Australia and the United Kingdom (UK) from 2011 to 2020 to track how causes, consequences and solutions to AMR are represented in countries with different policy approaches. Analyses demonstrate greater variability in the frames used in UK newspapers reflecting large hospital and community outbreaks and a sustained period of policy reform mid-decade. Newspapers in Australia focus more on AMR causes and consequences, highlighting the importance of scientific discovery, whereas UK coverage has greater discussion of the social and economic drivers of AMR and their associated solutions. Variations in the trends of different frames around AMR in UK newspapers indicate greater levels of public deliberation and debate around immediate and actionable solutions; whereas AMR has not had the same health and political impacts in Australia resulting in a media framing that potentially encourages greater public complacency about the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]