Jeremy Corbyn’s election to Labour Party leader represented an ideological challenge to the neoliberal consensus in British politics. It also signalled the start of an uncritical hostility from the British press (Cammaerts et al, 2020). There has been research on citizen-generated, digital content in favour of Corbyn (Dean, 2019; Mcloughlin and Southern, 2020) which includes a large visual element. However, there has been no research on the visual aspect of the negative coverage he received. In this thesis, I answer Dean’s (2019) call to take visuals more seriously in the study of British politics and consider how conditions offline influence those online, and vice versa. I adopt Chadwick’s (2017) notion of the hybrid media to move beyond the old vs new media binary, whilst recognising that news organisations still have a strong influence within the hybrid media (Chadwick et al., 2018; Chadwick and Vaccari, 2019). Focusing on the visual element of the coverage, I carry out multimodal discourse analysis of negative coverage across the hybrid media. I find that Corbyn was constructed as dangerous through a process of ‘Othering’. This ‘Otherness’ was articulated through its binary opposition to a ‘Britishness’ constructed via an (neo)imperial discursive repertoire. Analysing the visual dimension of this coverage reveals how power operated to position Corbyn within the ‘space of the possible’. Ultimately, this power ensured the dominance of a neoliberal dogma integral to Britain’s neo-imperial international presence and domestic relations of inequality. The power to (in)visibilise is the power to hide the past, construct the present and deny any number of possible futures, both domestically and internationally.
Jeremy Corbyn in the Hybrid Media: The Visual Construction of a Danger
Guarini, M. W. (Author). 7 May 2024
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)