An analysis of Media Discourse: Theresa May's image during the Brexit negotiations

Abstract

The Brexit process has been the center of attention of all British media since its beginning and has been the focus of divergent opinions, about how to deliver it, whether there should be a deal or not and what should the deal be like. Apart from the process itself, a person in particular has also been the center of attention and that person is Theresa May. Indeed, as she arrived at N°10, Downing Street, the tide of the Brexit negotiations was already on its way and although she committed to fight injustice in the United Kingdom, the sheer force of the event left her little time to focus on anything else. As she tried to create deals that would satisfy both the European Union and the United Kingdom so that the separation could be carried out in an orderly way, the task proved to be much more complicated than anyone could have anticipated. The objective of this thesis is to highlight the bias and subjective parts of certain newspaper articles to try and draw conclusions on the reasons that would explain why some choices were made in the writing of the article, whether that would be a political affinity from the author, from the media company or anything else. However, the objective is in no means to discredit a newspaper in favor of another in regard to its neutrality or lack thereof, but rather to show that these biases are actually hard to avoid. As we will see there are a great number of them, our aim is to give examples to see how we can pay closer attention to these details when reading an article, whatever its source might be. In our case, we chose to study the time period from September 2018 to July 2019. We will also compare the newspapers between them apart from the individual analysis, as it will give us the opportunity to better understand the reasons behind certain stances we will have discovered in the articles.