The Image of a Country created by International Media : The Case of Bulgaria [1 ed.] 9781443863018, 9781443859011

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The Image of a Country created by International Media: The Case of Bulgaria

The Image of a Country created by International Media: The Case of Bulgaria

By

Elena Tarasheva

The Image of a Country created by International Media: The Case of Bulgaria, by Elena Tarasheva This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Elena Tarasheva All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5901-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5901-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Motivation The research project Map of the Book Chapter One ................................................................................................. 5 Image Studies Terminological Disambiguation A Nation’s Image Studies of Images Media Studies Fair Representation of nations Cultural Studies Discourse Analysis Image Studies of Immigrants and Eastern Europeans RAS and RASIM Racism and Xenophobia Philosophical Premises Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 20 Content Analysis Content Analysis as an Essential Part of Media Analysis Media Bias News Values Coding Categories Data Rubrics Missed News Degrees of Engagement Participant Roles Thematic Threads Conclusions Issues of Methodology

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Table of Contents

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 68 Critical Discourse Analysis Systemic Functional Grammar Nominalisations, Passivisations and other devices Discourse Analytical Questions Lexical Devices Pragmatic Devices Genre Specifics Corpus Article 1. Article 2. Article 3. Article 4. Conclusion Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 115 Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies Providing material for CDA Parsing the Corpora Corpora Analytical Assumptions Pilot Corpora Established Methodology Main Study Key Words Collocates Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 154 Conclusions Answers to the Research Questions Discussion of the Methodology Cross-examining the data Methodological improvements Bibliography ............................................................................................ 168

INTRODUCTION

Motivation Covering debates at the EU Parliament, the anchor of the BBC programme The Record Europe, Shirin Wheeler heard one of her interviewees say that Bulgaria and Romania meet the criteria to join the Schengen zone. With a sour face, she retorted “Yes, but some people have misgivings about these countries” and cut short the turn. The attempt to see more about the incident brought me to a BBC page whose content was “unavailable for your region (Bulgaria – E.T.)”. The fact that those implicated with the discourse may not have access to it is an indication that the discourse is not based on reason and not oriented to understanding (Habermas 1965). Not only is Bulgaria the object of “misgivings” but Bulgarians are also banned from taking part in discussions about this. Cases like this are not infrequent, so I decided to study the image of Bulgaria in international media. What could have been said about my country to make it so distasteful to the world? Bulgaria became a member of the European Union (EU) in 2007. Since then its citizens have been hoping to obtain full access to the labour markets in the EU countries – as stipulated in the constitutional documents of the Union - and to join the visa-free Schengen zone, like their European fellow citizens. However, several restrictions are in place and even more are being enforced. Each year several sanctions are imposed on the country by EU organs for failure to comply with different criteria. France, Germany, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Belgium have announced that they will delay Bulgaria’s admission to the Schengen area, although Bulgaria fulfils the technical criteria to join. The attitudes to Bulgarian workers - and Bulgarians in general, do not appear positive. All the old members of the EU, except for Sweden maintain special regimes for Bulgarian workers in their countries. Moreover, websites are launched inviting people to complain about Bulgarians taking their jobs etc. A deluge of articles about the threat of Bulgarian immigrants to the UK flooded the British press in view of the lifting of the restrictions for Bulgarians in the UK in 2014. Several unpleasant observations about Bulgarian people were made, such as Farage’s words: “Bulgaria is going through serious problems, endemic corruption, an economy that has flat-

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Introduction

lined, and I suspect their youngest and brightest will try to find work.” The rhetoric against Bulgarians and their admission to the UK is said to have won the UK Independence Party a victory in a local by-election. Another issue is that Bulgaria seems to be thought of in tandem with its northern neighbour, Romania. In the preparatory process before the accession to the EU, Romania was reported to lag behind for several criteria and Bulgarians feared the association might draw the country backwards. After the accession, the projected figure of the feared potential immigrants to the UK - 27 million - was dominated by the Romanian contribution, as the entire Bulgarian population is about 7 million. The scaremongering reports about the influx feature “a wave of Romanian crime”, quoting that a large percentage of the pick pockets in London are Romanians. No such figures are given about Bulgarians; however, the country is stuck to its bigger and allegedly dangerous neighbour. But where does this dislike for Bulgaria stem from? How do people create an image of a country without being in direct contact with it? International media have such a role to play. The BBC purports to ‘bring the world to the UK’. However, several researchers, Weaver and Wilhoit (1984), among many others, argue that western media use their hegemonic power to construct negative images and media representations of underprivileged others: usually the less-developed countries. Their project – the New World Information Order – was rejected as trying to put boundaries to the freedom of speech. However, evidence resurfaces that Eastern Europeans are negatively represented and a study is in order to determine what images come across from the materials published by the respective media. Are they really negative, can the outcome of media coverage be monitored to weed out deliberate defaming of nations?

The research project This book presents an attempt at developing an analytical mechanism for establishing the image of a country through media publications. The actual research lasted 7 years and explored material representative of the image BBC created for Bulgaria because it includes all the publications on the website for a period of 5 years – from 2007 to 2012. Three research methodologies are applied on the corpora: Content Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Methods. The methodology is evolved in the course of the research, feeding on a critical evaluation of its previous applications. The research question is:

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What image is created for Bulgaria on the website of the BBC? The answer requires collection and analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data. To reach an answer, the following objectives are set: 1. To explore the quantity of material published about Bulgaria. Is it equal to that about other countries, does it follow the same agenda as that for other countries, are topics hidden from the audience and are others imposed by the medium? 2. What language is used to speak about Bulgaria – is it construed as an active participant in the discourses, or is it relegated to a circumstantial role? Are there nominative practices – idioms, titles, adjectives – which derogate the country? Are strategies of otherisation employed to the country? 3. What data emerge from extended collections of media texts? What topics or themes are suggested concerning the aboutness of the texts by Key Word lists? What collocational associations are made with the term BULGARIA in the corpus? The BBC was selected for this in-depth study as a medium which specialises in the coverage of world news. It is a public broadcaster committed to public service rather than commercial gain, according to its charter (Royal Charter 2006). One of the aims proclaimed there is: “(4f) Bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK”. Among the projected goals are “to build a global understanding of international issues by providing international news broadcasting of the highest quality and by enabling individuals to participate in the global debate on significant international issues”. With a view of these aims and goals, the coverage of a country would have to project an image that reflects the reality so that the audience would be left with perceptions of the region that are not skewed in one direction or another.*** Unlike other agencies, like Reuters, BBC has no focus on one specific field, such as economics. Therefore, the coverage would be expected to bring a full-flooded picture of reality from all spheres of life. A preliminary analysis established that other international media CNN and Euronews - provide too little material for analysis. The CNN site offers 3 stories between 2007 and 2008, and they are all sports stories. It may be that Bulgaria is too distant and small for American broadcasters, in effect – a minute country on a different continent. At the same time, the website of Euronews does not provide a search engine allowing targeted searches. Nevertheless, for the first year of the study - 2007, no more than

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Introduction

6 materials were found. Therefore, going for the BBC was, indeed, the only option when looking for international coverage by a news medium.

Map of the Book The research is presented in five stages, each set as a chapter. The first chapter outlines a review of image studies conducted by various disciplines and an account of theoretical concepts useful in such a venture. The second chapter presents content analysis as a tool for image studies. Several techniques are exploited to study the media material and the results are discussed with a view of their aptitude for the task of establishing the image of a country. The third chapter presents studies which apply Critical Discourse Analysis to media texts. The techniques are based on Systemic Functional Grammar Analysis. The Fourth Chapter shows corpus analysis and the contribution it gives to image studies. The Fifth Chapter draws the line summarising the contribution each of the proposed methods gives to establishing images and evaluates the methodology. Theoretically, the research is situated on the interface between Media Studies and Discourse Analysis. The concept of a country’s image created through media is very much within that theoretical domain. The object of the investigation is a medium and the tools are discourse analytical with reference to its critical dimension, inasmuch as the topic applies to a country which has been construed as a pariah on the international scene and issues of inequality and domination are expected.

CHAPTER ONE IMAGE STUDIES

Terminological Disambiguation A query in Google Scholar with search term IMAGE returns about 3,180,000 hits. Most often the term refers to “body image” – mainly associated with adolescents, girls, boys, dieting, masculinity etc. Secondly, IMAGE is associated with tourist destinations. References to “image” in the sense: “a mental representation due to any of the senses (not only sight) or to organic sensations” (Oxford English Dictionary 5ɚ) are used in reference to the stature of mentally disturbed people, of various professions and only rarely – to the image of ethnic groups or countries. Whenever the image of a place is researched, more often than not the place is Africa and its inhabitants. The term REPRESENTATION, for its part, returns fewer hits 1,460,000. Most of them relate to cultural identity and the most quoted author is Stuart Hall. Not surprisingly, the identity under scrutiny is mainly that of people of colour. Quite a few authors from sociology, cultural studies and discourse analysis take up Baudrillard’s (1994:11) claim that the dramatic changes in the technology of reproduction have led to the implosion of representation and reality. Increasingly representation becomes dominant as “simulacra” are substituted for a reality that has little or no foundation in experience. He draws a contrast between simulation and representation. Whereas representation attempts to absorb reality by interpreting it as a false image, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as a simulacrum. Thus media bombard people with images thereby subconsciously sowing attitudes, while the audience is manipulated to believe these are their own impressions of the real thing. At the recipient end – decoding the media message, Hall (1982) claims that people are not “cultural dopes”, passively reading texts as the producers intended them to be read. However, educational initiatives (The Media Literacy Online Project, Centre for Media Literacy, to mention but a few) exist to teach members of the public to analyse the concept of

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Chapter One

representation, to achieve a critical distance from what is shown on TV and what is printed in the media. Therefore, establishing that what people see in the media is, in fact, an image deliberately created for them and not the real thing requires an effort and does not take place automatically. The process of representing people involves a specific type of recontextualisation (van Leeuwen, 2009:148): a social reality is transposed into a discourse constrained by the specific angle of vision of the medium with its political views, economic entanglements etc. These images comply with the policies projected by the broadcaster/publisher and have often been shown to apply semiotic tools of power and domination. In this study I employ the second meaning of image – a mental picture of a country created through media publications. I consider the term “image” synonymous to “representation”, although the case can be made that an image is the result of representations. While “representation” harks to cultures and national identity, my agenda here bears a closer connection with what impressions about a country audiences are left with from exposure to media discourses.

A Nation’s Image The oldest line of discourses about public images belongs to Public Relations and Political Science. According to Kunczik (1990:44) “an image of a nation constitutes the totality of attributes that a person recognises (or imagines) when he contemplates that nation.” He goes on to explain that such an image consists of three analytically distinguishable components - a cognitive component relating to what we know, an affective component relating to how we feel about the nation; and an action component that relates to actual behaviour towards the nation. According to Scott (1965:72) the cognitive component is a person’s subjective knowledge about a nation; the affective component is his or her like or dislike, approval or disapproval, or level of hostility toward a nation; and the behavioural component consists of a person’s action tendencies towards a nation. National image, then, is defined as the cognitive representation that a person holds of a given country and its people, what a person believes to be true about a nation. Of special importance to political action is the benevolence or malevolence imputed to other nations in the images, as well as the historical component of the image. Feelings about a country's future are also important (Kunczik 1990:10). The important question for this research is how images are produced and broadcast to the world. Kunczik (ibid) further says that neither folk

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learning nor science can shape adequate images of a nation, in his opinion – because of the complexity of the workings of the international system. By “adequate” scientists mean, he claims, a realistic image of the nation. Dutta-Bergman (2006:104) suggests that images result from a deliberate effort on the part of governmental agencies: Public diplomacy involves the communication of a government to the people of another nation with the goal of influencing their image of the sender nation. To the extent that public diplomacy attempts to influence the perceptions and opinions of the members of the target state with respect to the image of the source (nation), it embodies a form of public relations.

Studies of Images Over the years, several researchers have sought to study the image of countries, communities or issues, exploiting a vast array of methodologies lodged in different research paradigms. Among this rich variety, three strands can be discerned, classified here according to the theoretical frameworks that inform them. Firstly, Media Studies develop elaborate mechanisms which explore several aspects of media coverage: the intentions of the creators; the means they employ to highlight issues; audience response to media coverage of issues, such as ecological problems, negatively represented social groups like immigrants etc. The analytical tools they employ include “frame analysis”, “priming” and “agenda setting”, which draw attention to the fact that the media use – more or less effectively – techniques to highlight issues and set public agendas in favour of problems they see as important. Media theorists associate images with the power of the media to set the public agenda and throw into the limelight issues for discussion. Predictably, some are connected with electoral campaigns, while others highlight ecological problems, the status of science on the public arena etc. With the enhanced trend of migrations, various migrant groups come under scrutiny for the image they cut in the host society or the image of the host society in relation to their attitudes to the migrants. Yet other researchers seek to contribute to a public policy of creating an image for a community, a professional or ethnic group. Secondly, Cultural Studies tackle issues of images in relation with what Stuart Hall (1997) calls representations. They are defined as “the way people make sense of reality”. This means that representations are subjective and proceed from identities. Thus, boundaries are drawn in relation to a significant Other, where the representation stands in a meaningful relation to both subject and object of representation. It is

Chapter One

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important to recognise the power of representations: the ways in which people are represented have real consequences as far as their lives, rights and positions in society are concerned. Finally, Critical Discourse Analysis construes images from texts, exploiting an array of techniques to collect and analyse data, and to triangulate the findings. In the basis is the complex concept of Discourse and its specific relation to language and social realities. Emphasis is given to qualitative research which analyses phenomena deeply engraved in language but which bear impact on social structures. The researchers focus on media representations of ethnic or professional groups where bias is expected to exist, thus giving the analysis a partisan slant. Following is a review of each of the three research approaches and the multitude of methods employed by the practitioners.

Media Studies Weaver (2007:3) describes frame studies as an area of substantial growth after the year 2000, when researches using this methodology have more than doubled compared to the previous year. Frame analysis is a method borrowed from sociology and psychology to explicate the way we look at reality. This method stems from the work of the social psychologist Goffman (1974:11), who defines frames as “principles of organisation which govern the subjective meaning we assign to social events”. McQuail (2000) identifies two main meanings attributed to the term “frame”. One refers to the way in which news content is typically shaped and contextualised by journalists within some familiar frame of reference and according to some latent structure of meaning. The second sense concerns the effect of framing on the public. The audience is thought to adopt the frames of reference offered by journalists and see the world in a similar way. This process affects agenda setting. Goffman (ibid. 83) describes frames as comprising three parts: • • •

Primary frameworks – natural or social: guided doings – subject to social appraisal. Keys and keying – a key transforms one type of meaning into another, e.g. an expression of feeling into sarcasm. Designs and fabrications – induce a false sense of reality. “Intentional effort of one or more individuals to manage activity so that a party of one or more others will be induced to have a false belief about what it is that is going on.”

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Frames are obviously seen as formative factors which shape people’s perception of reality. The way they affect media coverage is demonstrated, for instance, in Gamson and Lasch (1983). The authors describe five framing devices: (1) metaphors, (2) exemplars (i.e., historical examples from which lessons are drawn), (3) catchphrases, (4) depictions, and (5) visual images (e.g., icons). They are complemented with three reasoning devices: (1) roots (i.e., a causal analysis), (2) consequences (i.e., a particular type of effect), and (3) appeals to principle (i.e., a set of moral claims). In addition to those basically linguistic and argumentative features, the authors also study media practices, such as accepting or rejecting comments, using illustration etc., actions by sponsors and the reaction of the audience. Gamson (1989) reviews discourses on nuclear energy by looking at what he calls “media packages”, which again include metaphors, catch-phrases and other symbolic devices employed in the discourse about the nuclear energy. It appears that attitudes to objects are deciphered mainly through the language used to write about them. Avraham and First (2010) suggest that media analysis contributes factors that are mainly quantitative. They collate frame analysis and cultural studies, which they consider complementary. “...One of the theories relies on the discussion of representation (Hall, 1997), while using the ideological and semiotic analysis of the text; the other uses quantitative indicators to measure the representation.... The analysis was undertaken with an understanding of the existence of a dialectical relationship between media frames and mode of representation.” Avraham and First conduct quantitative analysis of various types of TV coverage, of the voices that the TV channels select to broadcast and a qualitative analysis of identity formation issues and motifs which occur in the coverage. The authors conclude with the methods used for the symbolic extinction of the Other, such as suppressing coverage, including them in roles of Patient to the verbal action, lesser exposure etc.

Fair Representation of Nations Within media studies, but with a close relation to International Relations, stands the UNESCO initiative for the New World Information Order (NWICO). It starts with studies of the image of Africa and poses the question about the correlation between wealth and access to public image. Researchers – mainly of African origin - track the image of Africa (Okigbo 1995, Ojo 2002, Salawi 2006). Not surprisingly, they reveal that mostly topics of wars, famine and various other disasters prevail in the coverage of the continent, metaphorically referred to as the Dark

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Continent. The studies are largely partisan, proceeding from the assumption that Africa tends to be misrepresented, according to the respective researchers. The initiative New World Information Order (NWICO) (MacBride, Sean et al. 1980) was purportedly aimed at a fairer representation of the developing nations in the media, but evolved into a multifaceted theoretical and political movement with serious repercussions on the world at large, such as Britain and the USA leaving the UNESCO. The NWICO debate was in full swing throughout the 1970s and 1980s of the twentieth century and reflected activities of the United Nations, and particularly - within UNESCO. One of its basic assumptions was a link between economic progress and the availability of information. Brown-Syed (1993) writes: ...liberal theorists maintained that national cultures and sovereignty were not threatened by information concentration, while structuralist and socialist analysts argued that they were. In particular, the NWICO proponents, mostly drawn from the ranks of non-aligned nations, claimed that Western ownership and control of both the news media and their distribution channels constituted a form of cultural dominance whose covert goal was capitalist economic expansion. This argument, played out in fora such as the Non-Aligned Movement and Unesco conferences drew support from the Soviet Union, and hostility from Western administrations. It was partly due to fears of the growing “politicization” of UNESCO that the United States and Great Britain withdrew from that organisation in the mid-1980s... The NWICO movement began as a protest over the concentration of print and broadcast media ownership among de facto cartels, and developed into an argument about the cultural dominance of poor nations by wealthy ones.

With reference to the current state of the world, Brown-Syed maintains that the problem of uneven world development has not disappeared with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In his opinion, “indeed, we in the West are provided daily with ample evidence that a whole segment of the globe - Eastern Europe - is almost as badly off as the so-called “developing” nations.” Although he does not take the step to say that this translates into a new asymmetry in the spread of information, several arguments in his text lead us to believe so. The methodologies of those researchers whose interest is Africa are based on frame studies. In one of the recent samples of this strand, Ogunyemi (2011) explores the representation of Africa on a specialised BBC website. He contrasts two paradigms according to the attitude: largely negative and mostly positive. By exploring the frames of reference of the users and moderators of the website, the sources of the information

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and the editorial policies for allowing and rejecting comments, Ogunyemi concludes that the website repeats the frame of reference of “mainstream media”. He suggests that if the website develops an improved understanding for Africa and its culture, it would be better able to shake off the tendencies suggested by the “mainstream media”. The researchers in this vein seem to split the media into two large groups: “mainstream” – American or European - opposed to “local”, African. Semantically, the antonym of “mainstream” should be “peripheral”. But then the concept clashes with the fact that if the object of representation is Africa, then African media would be central, not peripheral. Such discourse, in effect, grants focal status to European and American media, and tacitly endorses the fact of their wider influence over world audiences, creating the “mainstream picture” of the world. BrownSayed (1992) actually articulates it that being in control of the major international media, the West broadcasts an image of the East – be it the Orient, or Eastern Europe - which reflects its own semiosis of what the East represents. How that fits in with the self-evaluation of the East and what significance it has for the self-definition and progress is the issue at stake for this research. Whether this type of representing others is in the basis of discrimination and social inequality is a question to answer. The argument for a much more balanced – and less biased - representation of poor nations was dismissed at the end of last century as an infringement on the freedom of speech of the rich nations. However, my research appears to raise the question again: is it true that a bad image befits a poor country and are richer nations in their right to broadcast negative images of those less affluent than themselves?

Cultural Studies The second strand of image studies is informed by Cultural Studies and the concept of “representation”. The researches present what images come across as a result of media publications about countries, professional and ethnic groups or issues in public life. For example, the Swedish research project on “Media and European Identity: National or Regional Media Perceptions of the USA?” (Hammarlund and Riegert 2011) traces the discursive image of the USA in the elite media of five European countries: France, Finland, Sweden, Germany and Russia. It studies media publications through the period of the Cold War under President Reagan until six months after the installation of President Obama. The purported aim of the project is to establish a European identity evolving in comparison to a significant Other (America) and as a conscious effort of

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media organisations. The media are presented as “fodder for identity processes”, which plays a key role in the production and circulation of ideas, nurturing local, national and transnational communities’ sense of themselves, often through identifying those who they are not. The method is qualitative content analysis, where the textual analysis is based on a schema categorising various aspects of the journalistic discourse. The researchers look at metaphors used to describe America, such as “the Space Cowboy”, “the gum chewing American soldier”, “the benign benefactor” etc. Recurring themes are also analysed, such as the cold war, disarmament etc. Additionally, an assessment is offered of how active or passive the USA appears in various contexts. Predictions and consequences of events America is involved in are also explored. In addition to these – in effect, analyses of mostly linguistic phenomena, argumentation schemes are subjected to analysis as well. Lines of argument for and against political doctrines, such as multilateralism, multiculturalism are traced in the publications. Public figures such as presidents are analysed, and roles attributed to their actions through different journalistic genres are discussed. The research mechanisms make it possible to discern the explicit or implicit use of symbols and narratives adopted by writers and political actors to characterise the USA and its presidents. The co-ordinators conclude that “although few clear signs of a common European public sphere are observed and some countries’ media are “more European” than others (Risse 2010; Wessler et al., 2008), taken together, the broad similarities in the paradigms and characteristics used to depict the USA seem to affirm a European identity, but also an image of America which is multifaceted and informed by different beholding eyes”. An interesting feature worth mentioning in view of the subject of the current research is the fact that the research on all the countries for the study is conducted by scholars native to the country under scrutiny with the exception of Russia, which is studied by Swedish investigators. The impression, then, is that the research explores similar – if not identical – language units to frame analysis. Images are seen as projected by the language of the publication, including metaphors and rhetoric. It also seems that the validity of studies of this kind depends on the selection and sampling of the material and on the judgement of the researchers. The closest Cultural Studies research gets to verification is that opinions from two or more raters are compared to get an objective evaluation of a piece of material.

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Discourse Analysis Firstly, I discuss semantic threads in the definitions of discourse, all of which feed into a framework of discussing images. One strand (Schiffrin 1994:41) claims that discourse is a layer in the hierarchic organisation of language activity, with small units like lexemes at the bottom and big and complex formations such as discourse – at the top. Another semantic thread in the definitions places this basically linguistic phenomenon within several socio-linguistic concepts such as genres, situational contexts, participants and their roles. Thereby discourses present the interplay between linguistic and social features. From the multitude of definitions, Fairclough’s is the one embraced by Discourse Analyists (2009:164): “Discourses are semiotic ways of construing aspects of the world (physical, social or mental) which can generally be identified with different positions or perspectives of different groups of social actors”. From a practical point of view Foucault’s (1972: 109) definition – or narrative description – suggests that discourse compounds all the documents in society about a certain topic. This observation highlights the fact that to detect attitudes, the researcher needs to collate data from various sources and documents as one instance may be misleading. Reisigl and Wodak (2009:93) also make the point that different materials need to be analysed in order to shed light on an aspect of social life. Additionally, Wodak places the requirement for different analytical methods to be employed in order to achieve maximal reliability. In this way, the data can be used to reinforce or reject the conclusions. Fiske (1996:3) points out that discourse analysis differs from linguistic analysis in focusing on what statements are made rather than how they are made. Discursive analyses, therefore, do not trace the regularities and conventions of discourse as a signifying system, but engage with “analysing what statements were made and therefore what were not, who made them and who did not, and with studying the role of the technological media by which they were circulated.” He suggests that discourse should never be abstracted from the conditions of its production and circulation. Thus, the various levels of language, combined with the specific context of producing them add up to create a picture of the world encoded in discourses. Discourse analysis then needs to delve into the layers and discover what lies hidden. Wodak (1995:204) claims that Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) takes up the task of unravelling “opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language”. This is the reason why the

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specific type of discourse analysis dealing with such relationships is part of Critical Science. Social injustice is in the focus of Critical Social Science. It presents social reality as “conceptually mediated” (Marsden 1999), where the mediation of those less lucky is less favourable than they can expect. Fairclough (2009) specifies that CDA targets social ills such as inequality, manipulation and discrimination. Van Dijk (2006:362) claims that symbolic elites such as politicians, journalists, scholars, teachers and writers are in control of most influential public discourses, that is, play a special role in the reproduction of dominant knowledge and ideologies in society. Prejudice is socially acquired and the symbolic elites promote its acquisition through public discourses, where the source of shared ethnic prejudice and ideologies lies (Van Dijk, 1993). Therefore, CDA is characterised with a specific partisan position – taking the side of those discriminated against, those oppressed and dominated. Another addition to the amalgam of multidisciplinary methods is Historical Discourse Analysis, where media coverage is compared to historical evidence (Reisigl and Wodak 2009). The trustworthiness of the researches is based on the fact that data from several different sources are analysed, using an eclectic mix of analytical procedures – the discourse in brochures, interviews with participants and witnesses of the processes etc. This approach was first developed in order to trace the constitution of an anti-Semitic stereotyped image, or “Feindbild” as it emerged in public discourse (particularly press reporting) in the 1986 Austrian presidential campaign of Kurt Waldheim. The historical dimension of discursive acts in historical and political topics and texts is addressed in two ways: first, the discourse-historical approach attempts to integrate all available information on the historical background and the original sources in which discursive “events” are embedded. Second, it explores the ways in which particular types and genres of discourse are subject to diachronic change, as has been shown in a number of previous studies. In another study Wodak and Meyer (2001:72) conclude that four types of discursive strategies are associated with nations and national identities: constructive, helping create or consolidate national images; preservative or justificatory strategies, transformative strategies, aiming at changing an existing image, and destructive strategies. Analytically, three interrelated dimensions are explored: (1) contents/topics; (2) strategies; (3) linguistic means and forms of realisation. Particularly useful is the concept of topoi. Thus Classical Greek Rhetoric enriches the array of techniques wielded by Discourse Analysts. Topos is a term introduced by Aristotle in his Rhetoric (Roberts 1994). Its

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translation and definition is a contentious issue because Aristotle never defined it properly. For the purposes of CDA, Wodak and Meyer (2001:82) define topoi as the rules for deriving conclusions from their premises, quoting Kienpointner (1997). They claim that the topos of burdening, for instance, can be reduced to a conditional of the type “if a person is burdened by a specific problem, then they should be relieved of them”. They use Aristotle’s list of topoi to illustrate the image of foreigners in the Austrian press. Frame analysis was mentioned above as a typical approach applied by Media Studies. In fact, Discourse Analysis also employs frames to deal with political discourse. Van Dijk (1998) commends Gamson’s (1992) approach, because the media play a central role in framing public issues. Media frames are “largely unspoken and unacknowledged, organise the world both for journalists who report it and, in some important degree, for us who rely on their reports”. In effect, frames appear to be analysed via forms that are either linguistic – metaphors, catchphrases etc, or rhetorical – premises and conclusions. That is why the amalgam of media frame analysis and discourse studies is particularly beneficial and practised by a number of researchers and research teams.

Image Studies of Immigrants and Eastern Europeans Scott (2009:535) points out that “as globalization and migration continue to encourage the interaction of different peoples and cultures, so the media portrayal of different parts of the world plays an increasingly important role in either discouraging or promoting respect for other cultures”. No studies of the image of Bulgaria have been conducted as such. That is why for the literature review I expand the object of investigation into a larger focus – Eastern Europe and immigration. Recently Eastern Europeans have split from the former communist bloc and are trying to integrate into the community of European nations, be it by adopting “Western values”, abandoning Russian dictate or by virtually immigrating to the West. The latter process has caused many problems and raised panicky reactions from the West. The policies of looking at this situation have given rise to new nationalisms, elevating Western national identities and blaming the Easterners for invading the West and plundering its social systems of welfare. The discourses of this are becoming more and more dominant and Easterners see their image in the West more and more vilified.

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Chapter One

RAS and RASIM Baker et al (2008), working on a project funded by the UK government, compile corpora from articles in the British media on the issue of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants (RASIM). Employing methodology from CDA and Corpus Linguistics (CL), they study the co-text in which these words and phrases occur. They establish the collocates of all the four terms and elicit conclusions about attitudes to these people sown by the press with the articles in the corpus. The fact that most of the collocates belong to the category Entry/Residence/ Provenance/Transit/Destination suggests that in the British press there is a preoccupation with immigrants entering and staying in the UK. The most frequent verb used for these people – flee – leads to the conclusion that these activities have been planned and are not a spontaneous reaction. The abundance of quantifiers suggests that the number of these people causes serious concerns to British society. The extensive use of water metaphors, for its part, “tends to dehumanise RAS (Refugees and Asylum Seekers – E.T.), constructing them as out of control, agentless, unwanted natural disaster” (ibid:287). The discourses of immigrants leave the impression that a narrow scope of topics is discussed and the tone is generally negative.

Racism and Xenophobia Ter Wal (2002) in a large-scale study of European media, commissioned by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna, claims that for the 80s of last century the press has been accused of racist attitudes, even with the potential of inciting xenophobia among the reading public. The report on media and cultural diversity in the British media is done by Paul Statham and includes three sections: coverage, topics and sources; themes, framing and labelling; and media initiatives for promoting cultural diversity. Overall, Statham finds that there has been “an improvement in standards of journalism regarding the representation of minorities relative to previous decades.” With an adverse opinion, the eminent journalist Yasmin Alabai Brown is quoted saying: Many features of the earlier period remain stubbornly in place. Immigration is still discussed in terms of numbers and problems, 'black' families are still pathologised and 'Asians' in general only considered worthy of media interest if they can be shown to be 'culturally backward', if they are victims of racism or, less frequently, if they have made good as

Image Studies

17

hard working immigrants…. But even in the 1990s only the most pessimistic would argue that nothing has changed. Most obviously it has, and in the direction that was sought by those who were campaigning back in the 1970s and 1980s.

Statham’s report highlights the following assessments of racism in the British press: • an overall “not guilty” verdict from a study that aimed to judge the contents of media reporting on “race” in the 1997 British election against the charges of reproducing racial stereotypes and marginalising minority and anti-racist voices; • British migrants and minorities receiving significant news space to make their own political claims in the press; • a greater level of representation of minorities on British television programmes compared to earlier times; • difficulties in producing ethnic minority programming and limitations in employing minorities at senior levels within the broadcasting industry; • in part due to the increasing market-driven commercial pressures facing public and independent broadcasting. Among the observations is that “public broadcasting (BBC) in general gives more coverage to ethnic relations and immigration issues than independent broadcasting.” In effect an official obligation exists under the Race Relations Acts to promote equal opportunities. Addmittedly, space for “race issues” is provided in specialised news programmes, rather than in those aimed at general audiences. “Populist formats of broadcasting” are observed to contain fewer topics treating race problems. Newspapers, for their part, are not shown to have specialist reporters who cover “race”. Issues relating to immigration and ethnic relations are covered by Home Affairs, Crime and Law correspondents. The conclusions elicit that a major frame for the British press has been “Racism is wrong”. Almost 40% of the news items researched for the report “actively exposed racism and racial discrimination”. This high percentage holds across broadcasting and print media. The popular press contains a higher proportion of coverage that exposed racism - nearly 45%, which presents a reversal in populist tendencies in those media. Still, racist news items were established in the tabloid press (around 33%, compared to 24% in the broadsheets). However, these attitudes are demonstrated towards the native minorities.

18

Chapter One

There is a strongly negative attitude to immigrants and asylum seekers: 16% anti-immigrant themes versus 2.8% pro-immigrant themes). Recurrent anti-immigrant themes have been: demanding the reduction of migrant rights; immigrants as a burden on the welfare state; and a general topic of migrants as dishonest people (e.g. using false passports) and “bogus”. Stereotypes include the qualifications “cheats”, “bogus”, ungrateful, and as “scroungers”. The researchers find that such attitudes help improve racial relations in Britain by including local minorities in the “in-group” – or “us”, leaving immigrants in the “out-group” – “they”. The situation in the broadsheets is different – pro-immigration themes dominate. The report also reveals measures taken to increase the coverage of racial topics, as well as making sure that staffing policies “reflect the diversity of British society”, that is – more people from the minorities are employed in the media. In the year 2000, a charity called Presswise (http://www.presswise.org.uk) set up a special website that issues guidelines to journalists for covering sensitive topics relating to asylum and produces an e-mail bulletin monitoring recent incidents of reporting under the Refugees, Asylum-seekers and the Mass Media (RAM) programme.

Philosophical Premises In a study of the philosophical premises of immigrant attitudes, Balabanova and Balch (2012) claim that a considerable body of work focuses on media framing of immigrants and minorities. There immigrants are associated with disease and insecurity, crime, rioting, drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, welfare sponging, religious fanaticism and terrorism – topics far from pleasant or flattering for the people who have chosen to seek work elsewhere. Balabanova and Balch argue that “instead of criticizing how media frame certain groups such as immigrants themselves (for example, with racist stereotyping), attention needs to be paid to the deeper, ontological, framing which operates to inform or legitimise the ways in which ‘the other’ is subsequently portrayed.” In their study, the researchers identify two approaches to immigration – communitarian and cosmopolitan: the former conceives society as a closed system where closed borders are a precondition for justice, while the latter favours open borders and questions the right of governments to put checks on the right of individuals to cross national borders (references in Balabanova and Balch 2012:384). In articles from Bulgarian and British newspapers the two authors look for expressions of either viewpoint. The research framework posits Bulgaria as a mainly “sending” country, while the UK – as a “receiving” one.

Image Studies

19

Strangely enough, in both countries the communitarian outlook vastly outweighs the cosmopolitan. The subdivision of arguments reveals a predominance of the arguments in favour of social justice, followed by concerns about the welfare and economic arguments. The UK press is established to broadcast the concern that “[immigration] has increased unemployment among Britons, as well as keeping wages low for less skilled jobs. Schools, hospitals and GPs also come under pressure”. The diametrically opposite view that immigration benefits economic growth is also significantly presented in the corpus. The liberal press – Guardian and Independent - are established as proponents of cosmopolitan theses, claiming that immigration “changes attitudes, broadens outlooks and boosts the global economy”. The Bulgarian subcorpus, for its part, appears to have adopted the UK view that free labour movement should be restricted because of the high education, housing, welfare etc. costs. Such theses are countered with data that very few Bulgarians actually migrate to the UK. Bulgaria is also presented as raising its own level of control over the process. The costs to Bulgaria as a sending country are a dominant theme. The argument that Bulgaria exports criminality to the UK is vehemently refuted. As a whole, Balabanova and Balch establish that most of the immigration themes are imported into the Bulgarian corpus, including patriotic prioritisation and cultural protectionism. In the cosmopolitan vein, some articles “pointed out the hypocrisy that many reluctant “receiving” countries (mainly the UK) were also a source of emigration. An article in Sega (8 November 2006), for example, complained that “Brits” expect other people to be happy about their presence and at the same time to beg them for reciprocal hospitality”. Significantly, this section of the researched papers quotes mainly foreign leaders, e.g. Tony Blair refusing to live in a closed society. In general, it transpires that the British press does present immigrants as an isolated group, often accused of victimising public social funds and the life and identity of locals. Even Bulgarian media adopt the “closed community” attitude, admitting that a society has the right to impose restrictions on outsiders suspected of infringing on its liberties.

CHAPTER TWO CONTENT ANALYSIS

Content Analysis as an Essential Part of Media analysis The research question what image is created for Bulgaria with publications in British media can only be answered if quantitative and qualitative methods are combined. While qualitative methodologies dive below the surface to find what lies hidden in the linguistic forms, quantitative analysis shows the prevalence of topics in the coverage of a country in a numeric relation. Bryman (2004:183) defines Content Analysis (CA) as “an approach to the analysis of documents and texts that seeks to quantify content in terms of pre-determined categories and in a systematic and replicable manner.” Thus, an earlier definition (Markoff, Shapiro and Weitman 1975:5) claims that CA performs “systematic reduction of a flow of text to a standard set of statistically manipulable symbols representing the presence, the intensity, or the frequency of some characteristics relevant to social science”. Admittedly, CA is not among the most sophisticated instruments for analysis. Counting is considered mechanical and easily bypassing significant facts hidden beneath the surface of numbers. Moreover, its origins are believed to be rooted in “the work of propaganda analysts and journalists” (Markoff et al 1975:8). Quite often, CA tends to be associated with the Marxist attitude to media where the focus is on ownership, control and content (Edgley 2000:158). Liberal theorists, for their part, emphasise audience reaction and effect. When Gilbert (1993:197) considers CA subtle enough “to measure the relative salience of a theme by the frequency of its occurrence”, he does so only when working with “simple documents”, such as newspapers. How “simple” a document a newspaper can be considered is a debatable issue, but the fact remains that CA is assigned to simple objects of investigation. The pervasiveness of CA in media studies is beyond doubt. The study of immigration issues in the British press (Cottle 2000) uses numeric measures of the percentage of stories dedicated to themes related with immigration. It elicits them as a percentage of everything published about

Content Analysis

21

immigration. Thus it reveals which aspects of immigrant topics dominate in the researched sample of newspapers. Studying the image of communities, some researchers relate the amount of coverage as a percentage of all the material in the media. Pietikäinen’ (2003) compares the number of stories about the Sami to stories about other ethnic groups to establish a significantly smaller number of news items about the Sami, where the indigenous people are rarely quoted and often named with derogatory terms. At the same time actor roles are more often attributed to Finns than to Samis, suggesting that the active role in social life is not always attributed to the Sami. Others compare favourable to unfavourable articles and thus weigh the attitude of the media towards the investigated issue. Kovaèiè and Erjavec (2011), for their part, study of the image of doctors in Slovenia but rather than simply count articles, Kovaèiè and Erjavec split them into three groups: positive, negative and neutral and discuss the prevalence of each type. Balabanova and Balch (2010) evolve political statements about immigration and count the number of articles in the British and Bulgarian press which adhere to each stance. When Avraham and First (2010) combine Cultural Studies with Content Analysis to study representations of nationalities on television, their claim is that CA is about counting, while Cultural Studies adds a qualitative touch to their research. A safe generalisation would be that most – if not all - studies BEGIN with some sort of content analysis which forms part of the general description of the material. Indeed, Markoff et al (1975:18) argue against the conception of content analysis as a stand-alone method of discovery. They urge its application as a measurement technique whose value depends upon the total research design in which it is embedded. Conducting CA depends crucially on the choice of categories which form part of the coding schedule applied to the researched material. A popular method for Content Analysis is the so-called qualitative or ethnographic content analysis (ECA). Bryman (2004:392) quotes Altheide (1996) claiming that the attitude to the coding categories is more flexible with ECA: “categories and variables initially guide the study, but others are allowed and expected to emerge during the study, including an orientation to constant discovery and constant comparison of relevant situations, settings, styles, images, meanings and nuances.” What stories are published about Bulgaria depends on the specifics of the processes the media employ to select, present and publish materials. Extensive literature has been written about this. Below is an outline of arguments relevant to the research question of this study. This theory helped evolve the categories for the Content Analysis applies here.

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Chapter Two

Media Bias Ideally, the media are expected to cover stories as they occur in life. However, it has long been proven that they do not place a neutral mirror to reality. Their main sphere of operations is “the production and transformation of ideologies” Hall (1981:396). As the Glasgow University Media Group (1976: 1) put it, “the news is not a neutral product; … it is a sequence of socially manufactured messages, which carry many of the culturally dominant assumptions of our society”. Fowler (1991:10) attributes the lack of neutrality to institutional bindings - “because the institutions of news reporting and presentation are socially, economically and politically situated, all news is always reported from some particular angle”. Factors known to affect the selection of news are: the ownership of the medium, advertising concerns, the readership targeted by the medium and the ideologies embraced by the editorial board. The leftist view is that “bias is endemic because of the ties between media production and industrial-speculative capitalism (Fowler 1991:11)” and therefore the whole process of financing and producing news should be strictly regulated to provide alternative sources. Chomsky (1998:2) goes on to specify that because news is a commodity, selling it depends on the choices of the big corporations which control the processes of collection and distribution of news. News is determined by élite newsmakers: the élite media set a framework within which others operate. His example is that a small country newspaper cannot claim that what they say is newsworthy if it differs from the choices of big media tycoons. Chomsky’s theory is that the media and intellectuals exist to manufacture consent – purportedly, sidelining “the general public”. Liberal thinkers, for their part, justify the existence of media bias with the thought that in a free and democratic society each member of the press and each news organisation can put forward their views. So much so, Fowler argues, that education is called upon to train readers to distinguish the bias behind media representations. Without being personally biased, or deliberately deceitful, the media tend to reproduce a dominant political outlook into the way they present their news stories. Except for natural disasters and wars involving elite nations, few events can be considered “natural news”, unless promoted to this status by the news organisation. “News is the end product of a complex process which begins with a systematic sorting and selecting of events and topics according to a socially constructed set of categories (Hall 1978:53, Conboy 2007:11). At the same time, the selection and presentation of news at certain periods of time has had powerful effects on society. The

Content Analysis

23

Media Monitoring Unit (1990) established that the selection of topics helped television develop ideological lines which were against the Conservative Government in 1988. The Glasgow media group also detected that “the skilful news management” employed by the Coal Board and the Government helped undermine the miners’ solidarity during their strike (O’Sullivan et al. 1994:123). Therefore the responsibility of the media – also known as the fourth estate – for the attitudes they sow in society: if they present a social group as dangerous for the other members, then the group faces grave difficulties in its integration. The views of the institutional and social hierarchy are “well and truly embedded in the news values” (Conboy 2007:12) and the exploration of what is given news status can tell us a great deal about the positioning of the news media. The news values, for their part, as projected with the topics chosen for coverage by the media are part of the moral expectations of contemporary society. Thus the choices of news topics to be covered about a country should reveal the scaffolding of an image created for a country.

News Values The principles according to which the media sift material for coverage are known as news values. Brighton (2007:40) believes that they are researched with two types of agenda in mind. Firstly, some observers classify news values according to journalistic practices, i.e. the newsroom procedure what to accept or reject for publication. Secondly, a different strand of classifications imposes culturalist/sociological taxonomies on the editorial selection of topics. The landmark research which revealed how the media select what to publish is empirical. Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) established that media coverage is governed by criteria such as: Frequency: Events which occur suddenly and fit well with the news organization's schedule are more likely to be reported than those which occur gradually or at inconvenient times of day or night. Long-term trends are not likely to receive much coverage. Negativity: Bad news is more newsworthy than good news. Unexpectedness: If an event is out of the ordinary it will have a greater effect than something which is an everyday occurrence. Unambiguity: Events whose implications are clear make for better copy than those which are open to more than one interpretation, or where any understanding of the implications depends on first understanding the complex background in which the events take place.

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Chapter Two

Personalization: Events which can be portrayed as the actions of individuals will be more attractive than one in which there is no such “human interest.” Meaningfulness: This relates to the sense of identification the audience has with the topic. “Cultural proximity” is a factor here stories concerned with people who speak the same language, look the same, and share the same preoccupations as the audience receive more coverage than those concerned with people who speak different languages, look different and have different preoccupations. Reference to elite nations: Stories concerned with global powers receive more attention than those concerned with less influential nations. Reference to elite persons: Stories concerned with the rich, powerful, famous and infamous get more coverage. Conflict: Opposition of people or forces resulting in a dramatic effect. Stories with conflict are often quite newsworthy. Consonance: Stories which fit with the media's expectations receive more coverage than those which defy them (and for which they are thus unprepared). Notably this appears to conflict with unexpectedness above. However, consonance really refers to the media's readiness to report an item. Continuity: A story which is already in the news gathers a kind of inertia. This is partly because the media organizations are already in place to report the story, and partly because previous reportage may have made the story more accessible to the public (making it less ambiguous). Composition: Stories must compete with one another for space in the media. For instance, editors may seek to provide a balance of different types of coverage, so that if there is an excess of foreign news, for instance, the least important foreign story may have to make way for an item concerned with the domestic news. In this way the prominence given to a story depends not only on its own news values but also on those of competing stories With relevance to smaller nations, Galtung and Ruge (1965:83) point out that the expectation is of negativity. The news circulated of such nations tends to conform to a model reinforcing the reasons for these countries’ “backwardness” – crises, criminality and corruption. The typical example of news from such countries would be “news that emphasizes the difficulties low-rank nations have: signs of “immaturity” in terms of payment crises, political instability, murder at the top of society, etc.”

Content Analysis

25

Concerning international coverage, Venables (2005:13) asserts that inasmuch as the media function as “risk signals”, they tend to concentrate on neighbouring countries rather than on far-off ones. This relates closely to the category “meaningfulness” in Galutng and Ruge’s classification, inasmuch as it is understood as the quality of being “interpretable within the cultural framework of the listener or reader” (Galtung and Ruge 1965:67). Since 1965 several reformulations have been made but one cannot deny that they alter little in this trustworthy picture. Macshane’s news values (in Brighton 2007), for instance, present, in effect, a taxonomy of negativity: conflict, hardship, unusualness, oddity, individualism. Writing from the point of view of media practitioners, Harcup and O’Neil (in Brighton 2007:3) draw attention to two important factors which add up to the news value of a story – follow up and media agenda. By “follow up” they mean that stories which allow for developments are more likely to appear on the pages of newspapers. This evokes the idea that in selecting to cover an event the media see in it an opportunity to develop a topic, or if a tendency is established for one country, others similar to it can be checked for the same tendency and they would probably yield suitable material as well. Thus media agendas are evoked and propounded through story associations, which is also the motivation for one of the coding schedules in the present study. Thus the idea that the media published stories because they simply happened is as far as it gets from the actual situation. The content published by the media is shaped by the ideology of the media organisation, by practical concerns of the journalistic practice, by the popularity of people or events etc. Additionally, the dominance of the Western media propounded with the New World Information Order (NWICO) on the one hand, corroborated with Chomsky’s analysis of eliteism and Galtung and Ruge’s observations about the actual status of “backword” countries, on the other, can be expected to reduce Eastern European countries to a position of “underdogs”, a source of negativity and turmoil in the media.

Coding Categories The research question “What image is created for Bulgaria with publications in international media?” presupposes seeking answers to four types of questions. Firstly, how much material about Bulgaria finds a place on the pages of the medium. As no standards exist what constitutes “reasonable country coverage”, comparisons with publications about other

26

Chapter Two

countries will be sought. Secondly, what topics are selected for the coverage should be elicited. In mundane terms it appears fairly obvious what presents “a topic”. However, the need for consistent coding by more than one coder calls for unmistakably formulated categories. On the one hand, this can be done under the rubrics on the pages of the medium. On the other, topics can be elicited from the corpus of articles through logical operations. Both methods are worth experimenting with. Thirdly, each publication is called into existence by an event, public statement or journalistic investigation. This presents a different set of coding categories. In the fourth place, an account of what has been published as news in other media, but skipped by those under investigation gives an idea about media orientations or bias.

Data In effect, several Content Analyses are applied here with different coding categories. The results are presented together with a discussion of the methodology. The corpora are collected from the website of the BBC. Searches are generated with search terms BULGARIA and BULGARIAN, with the operator OR. Likewise, the data for the other countries included for the sake of comparison are elicited with the same search – country OR nationality for the same period.

Rubrics On a corpus from the website of the BBC between July 2008 and July 2007 the rubrics on the website were used as coding categories. They include: Sports, Crime, Government, Society, Regional Affairs, Natural Disasters, Economy, Entertainment, EU Business, Ecology, General information about the country and Science and Technology. A comparison is made between two countries of equal size – Bulgaria and Belgium. Table 2.1. presents the number of stories for each rubric about each country. The coverage of Bulgaria is smaller by more than 20% in absolute terms. Sports notably take up the lion share of articles about both countries. However, while the second largest number of articles about Belgium occurs in the rubric Government, for Bulgaria it is Crime. In fact, for Belgium crime is covered in articles twice fewer than the number for Bulgaria. Moreover, a marked absence of stories about Society, Science and Technology, and Entertainment in the coverage of Bulgaria is clearly

Content Analysis

27

visible. The amount of general information about the two countries appears standard for the BBC – 2 each. As for economic topics, the coverage is equal – 4 articles about each country. Rubrics Sports Crime Government Society Regional Affairs Natural Disasters Economy Entertainment EU Business Ecology General Info Science And Technology

Bulgaria (72) 25 34,7% 25 34,7% 5 6,9% 0 0 5 6,9% 4 5,5% 4 5,5% 0 0 0 0 2 2,7% 2 2,7% 0 0

Belgium ( 93) 35 37,6% 13 13,9% 15 16,1% 18 19,3% 0 0 0 0 4 4,3% 3 3,2 % 2 2,1% 0 0 2 2,1% 1 1%

Table 2.1. Articles on the BBC website about Bulgaria and Belgium by rubric So far, a hypothesis has been formulated that Bulgaria is associated with crime, and social-life issues are avoided. On the next stage, corpora for more European countries of equal size are analysed to ascertain whether this tendency is maintained. The comparison is extended over more countries. On the basis of proximity, European countries only are included in the research. Bulgaria’s population of 7.6 million and territory of 110 000 sq km is relatively comparable to: Belgium (10.5 million population, 30 500 sq km), Portugal (10.5 million population, 92 200 sq km), Finland (5.3 million population, 338 000 sq km), Denmark (5.4 million population, 43 000 sq km). In a geographical sense Belgium was expected to have a special status, as having maritime borders with the UK. Politically, it embodies several institutions of the European Union. At the same time, Bulgaria is a new member of the Union, with a weak economy and little political influence. Table 2.2 gives the number of stories about each of three additional countries in this survey.

Chapter Two

28

Sports Crime Government Society Regional Affairs Disasters And Accidents Economy Entertainment/Culture EU Business Ecology General Info Science And Technology International Aid

Finland (73)

Portugal (209)

Denmark (125)

46 7 2 12 1 0 0 1 2 0 2 0

63% 9,5% 2,7% 16% 1,3% 0 0 1,3% 2,7% 0 2,7% 0

152 9 0 8 0 40 0 2 6 0 2 0

72,7% 4% 0 3,8% 0 19,1% 0 0,9% 2,8% 0 0,9% 0

71 6 3 19 5 0 1 8 4 0 2 3

56,8% 4,8% 2,4% 15,2% 4% 0 0,8% 6,4% 3,2% 0 1,6% 2,4%

0

0

0

0

3

2,4%

Table 2.2. Coverage of other countries on the BBC by rubric In absolute terms, the coverage of Bulgaria is comparable to that of Finland, while Portugal and Denmark are covered with even more stories than Belgium. As can be seen, the coverage of no other country in the sample excludes social issues or issues of culture, science and technology. The trend to cover sports events extensively persists, while the number of stories about social life is even greater than that for Belgium – contrasting with the tendency for none about Bulgaria. The topics include Finland as the leader in secondary education according to a UN survey, followed by an extensive study of the relevance of early schooling featuring all the countries in this sample plus a number of others, but not Bulgaria; Finland as the healthiest place to live and as the “headquarters” of Santa Claus; Denmark as a monarchy and its links with the British Royal Family; Denmark and Portugal as former colonial powers; the plight of migrants in all the 3 countries; the positive attitudes to disability in the three countries etc. Table 2.3 compares the percentage of the different rubrics in the coverage for the five countries in this research.

Content Analysis A

Sportts Crime Governm ment Societty Regional A Affairs Natural Dissasters Econom my Entertain nment EU Busin ness Ecologgy General Info Science A And Technollogy Internation nal Aid

29

Bu ulgaria

Belg gium

Finland d

Denmark

63% 9,5% 2,7% 16% 1,3% 0 0 1,3% 2,7% 0 2,7% 0

Portug al 72,7% 4% 0 3,8% 0 19,1% 0 0,9% 2,8% 0 0,9% 0

334,7% 3 34,7% 6,9% 0 6,9% 5,5% 5,5% 0 0 2,7% 2,7% 0

37,6% 13,9% 16,1% 19,3% 0 0 4,3 3% 3,2 2% 2,1 1% 0 2,1 1% 1% %

0

0

0

0

2,4%

56,8% 4,8% 2,4% 15,2% 4% 0 0,8% 6,4% 3,2% 0 1,6% 2,4%

Table 2.3. C Comparison between b the five f countriess in percentag ge The imppression is thaat the coveragee of Bulgaria is less varied d in terms of the rubriccs under which it has been included. Thaat is why pie charts c are designed to explicate thee contribution n each rubricc makes to th he overall picture. The pie ccharts below show what thee coverage off Bulgaria and d Belgium contains in tterms of domiinant rubrics.

Belgiu um

B Bulgaria economy 4,30% society 0% 19,30

sport 344%

enterrtain mennt; 3,200% sports, 37.70%

crime 334% goveernm en nt; 16,10%

mposition Pie Charts 2.11. Content Com

crime, 13.90%

Chapter Two

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As can be seen, the coverage of Belgium is much more varied, including more topics attracting almost equal attention to each sector of the coverage. At the same time, for Bulgaria the interest is equally split between two topics: sports and crime and a very small percentage of the coverage goes to other topics. Provisional Conclusion The answer to the question whether the BBC published fewer articles about Bulgaria than about other European countries of similar size is in the positive – fewer articles are published about Bulgaria. Additionally, the tendency to focus on crime and steer clear of social topics looms large when covering Bulgaria in comparison to the other countries selected for this corpus. Next, we follow the established trend over time. Table 2.4. shows the data about the coverage of Belgium and Bulgaria for 2010. Sports have been removed as irrelevant to the image of individual countries: Crime Society Regional Affairs Economy Entertainment & Culture EU Business Science And Technology Total

Belgium 43 39,4% 38 34,8% 0 0 7 6,4% 7 6,4% 14 12,8% 0 0 109 items

Bulgaria 13 37,1% 0 0 2 5,7% 1 2,8% 2 5,7% 16 45,7% 1 2,8% 35 items

Table 2.4. BBC coverage of Bulgaria and Belgium for 2010 With the exclusion of sports, the overall coverage of Bulgaria is even more reduced in number. While for the year 2007 it was 20% smaller than that for Belgium, for 2010 it is about one third of the amount for Belgium. The neglect for social stories from Bulgaria persists, but the interest in entertainment and culture shows a significant growth. The coverage of science and technology is reversed – while in 2007 the BBC published about Belgian technology but not about Bulgarian, for 2010 material is published for Bulgaria but not for Belgium. A dramatic shift is observed in the coverage of crime. While back in 2007 crime stories about Bulgaria significantly outnumbered those about Belgium, in 2010 the crime stories

Content Analysis A

31

from Belgiuum are more – albeit by 4%. 4 The coveerage of EU stories in relation to B Bulgaria, for itts part, significcantly outnum mbers that for Belgium.

Bulga aria

EU business 45,70%

crime, 37.10%

entertai nment and culture; 5,70%

regionall affairs; econom 5,70% y 2,80%

Belgiu um Entertai

nment and culture 6,40%

EU business 12,80% Crime, 39.40% Society, 34.80%

Economy 6,40%

Pie Chart 2.2.. Content compposition 2010.

Thereforre, it would not n be correcct to accuse the BBC of covering mainly crim me stories aboout Bulgaria. The diachronnic compariso on shows that the medium respondds to realitiess and does noot specifically y pick up

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Chapter Two

crime for its coverage of Bulgaria. At the same time the tendency to steer away from social stories about Bulgaria persists. For 2010 the percentage of stories in the coverage of Bulgaria is shown in pie chart 2.2. Sports stories, which were established to follow a pattern of their about each country, are excluded. The situation remains unchanged for Bulgaria from the year 2007: again two main topics dominate the coverage with smaller portions allotted to 3 minor rubrics. Unlike the year 2007, when the coverage was dominated by sports and crime, for the year 2010 these are EU business and crime. For Belgium the year 2007 revealed a varied coverage, dominated by sports, but including a number of other topics. For 2010 the range of topics is again more varied and the coverage – more balanced unlike the two-track reporting from Bulgaria. An additional parameter for the coverage of countries is why articles were published on the website. This is a category more difficult to code. The sub-corpus on crime for Bulgaria clearly sets off four types of reasons for publishing an article: an event in life, a public statement, background information and media induced coverage. Table 2.5 presents the crime stories about Bulgaria classified according to these categories. As can be seen, public statements provoked articles about Bulgaria most often, followed by events and media-induced coverage. The latter are stories generated by BBC reporters who visited the country and filed reports on a topic of their choice. Three of the stories in the period under investigation present an undercover investigation where a BBC reporter posed as a person demanding Bulgarian children to be trafficked to England and discovered a ring ready to conduct the traffic. One interview is dedicated to the investigation of the mysterious death of Georgi Markov’s, a Bulgarian dissident writer killed in London in 1978. The reporter reveals details of the case purportedly on the occasion of a new visit to Bulgaria, which is why the article was classified as media-induced. For the sake of comparison, the same coding schedule was applied to the articles about Belgium. Table 2.6 below presents the results. The absence of what was called “media-induced coverage” is clearly visible. No back ground, or public statements were observed either. The conclusion would be that background is needed for less familiar regions like Bulgaria, while the situation in Belgium is generally familiar for the BBC audience. Furthermore, events rather than public statements show a closer link to the actual reality in the country. However, the fact that reporters did not visit Belgium to induce coverage of stories of child trafficking appears significant for several reasons.

Content Analysis

Event (5)

Public statement (12)

Mediainduced (5) Background (3)

33

Articles HIV medics released to Bulgaria Bulgarian joy at medics' return Relief and anger in Bulgaria Bulgaria seeks HIV medics' return Shields passes lie detector test Bulgarian crime writer shot dead Mrs Sarkozy urges medics' release Libya 'wants EU ties for medics' Libya protests at medic pardons Libya details medic release deal Bulgaria 'to waive Libyan debt' Libya revokes HIV death sentences Bulgaria requests medics' return Jailed fan to be released in 2010 Bulgaria refuses Shields pardon EU urges action on Balkan graft Bulgaria's threat from corruption EU warns Bulgaria after killings How BBC exposed Bulgarian child trade BBC exposes Bulgarian child trade Laying bait for child smugglers Bulgaria under pressure over crime Detectives pursue Markov killer Timeline: Bulgarian medics trial Profiles: The imprisoned medics Q&A: Libya medics trial

Table 2.5. Types of provisional occasion for the articles A check on the BBC website shows that undercover investigations are quite common for the BBC, revealing cases of poor hygiene in social institutions, bribery in tests for acquiring citizenship, the hardships of immigrant life, alcohol sold to underage children etc. As for cases outside the UK, reporters have gone undercover to Burma to discover how people are recovering from cyclone Nargis, electoral fraud in Zimbabwe, life in North Korea, caging of children in the Czech Republic, the brothels in Cambodia and Thailand. The list shows that the BBC takes no risks in sending undercover reporters to places where wrong-doing would be hard to find. Therefore, targeting Bulgaria as the place for such investigations is a tell-tale sign for the reputation of the country.

34 Event (12)

Chapter Two Life sentence for French killer The couple who 'hunted virgins' French killer forced into court French 'serial killer' on trial Police hunt St Helier attackers Former DR Congo leader arrested Belgium frees jailbreak suspects Belgium foils al-Qaeda jailbreak Belgium 'jailbreak king' caught Jailbreak sparks Belgium outcry Scot arrested in child porn probe Europe child porn probe nets 92 Long sentence for Rwanda murders

Public statement 0 Media-induced 0 Background 0

Table 2.5. Providing occasions for the coverage of Belgium From the classification into occasions for publishing articles we can also see how special attention is given to a topic. For the case of the Bulgarian nurses held and sentenced in Libya the coverage includes three sorts of articles: prompted by events, statements and giving background to the story. The only type missing is media-induced coverage. The same is true of the coverage of the British football fan accused of murder in Bulgaria. Thus, expounding on a topic means that the medium uses different occasions to write about it. The coding category “providing occasion for publishing an article” is applied on a small corpus but it holds a great potential for exploitation. It shows the readiness of a medium to conduct undercover investigations in countries where wrongdoings can be expected. This is a clear sign of the perceptions of a country by the medium. Reporting statements or events is another parameter which can show how closely a topic is followed by the medium. Providing background, for its part, is a sign of significance attached to a story, but also - of an expectation that the region is unknown to the audience. More extensive corpora should be coded for these categories to explore them as categories for CA.

Content Analysis

35

Missed News The literature review revealed that it is of great importance to study which stories are covered about a country and which have not been covered. To establish stories neglected by the BBC, I compare their coverage with stories about Bulgaria over the same period by other international news agencies. Reuters published the following stories which are not available in my corpus for Bulgaria: Reuters, society stories for 2007-8 Bulgaria: Kozloduy asks IAEA to check nuclear fuel Utilities challenge Bulgaria power price increase Bulgaria Billboard builds new printing plant Bulgaria to shut 12 arms dump depots after blasts Explosions rock Bulgaria's capital Sofia Soviet-era limos offered for sale in Bulgaria World Bank urges Bulgaria to save up for calamities Bulgaria moves to register Cyrillic Internet domain Balkans safer than Western Europe - UN Easter passions resurrect a Balkan feud over lamb Bulgaria CEZ power workers strike over pay, jobs Bulgaria says will do more to fight gang crime Here we see stories about creative efforts – a new plant is being built, a domain in the native language has been registered. Competition in the production of meat is entered by Bulgaria in the hope to surpass Greece in sales of lamb. Exotic items – Soviet era limos – serve as a source of income for the local economy. Particularly encouraging is the UN study that the Balkans are a safer place to live in than Western Europe. The country acts responsibly about nuclear fuel and provides for the prices of services, measures are taken against gang crime. This shows a responsible, socially concerned state where the economy is taking steps in the direction of producing income for its people. None of these stories, however, has found a place on the BBC website. Compared against Galtung and Ruge’s taxonomy, none of the stories satisfies the criteria for newsworthiness. The Reuters, for its part, is a different type of media, sending stories to several news media with little filtering or editorial policy constraints. Without quantifying the coverage, we seem to have established that reports of a generally positive character did occur in the researched period and came to the attention of media, but the BBC chose to cover none of them. An alternative list to compare the BBC coverage with would be stories classified as events of the year. For 2007 the classification of the Bulgarian

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National TV includes the following stories: Top news – release of the Medics from the Libyan prison Cabinet reshuffle Calamities – floods and fires, piracy and abductions Election fraud The death of the man initially accused of attempting to kill the Pope Trials against high ranking political figures for theft Political killings Racial unrest – gypsy ghettos Of those stories only the first one was covered by the BBC, encompassing a number of news values: magnitude – five Bulgarian nurses were kept in a Libyan prison for over 9 years for allegedly infecting over 400 Libyan children with HIV and sentenced to death; negativity and involving elite nations – the release was finally completed with the help of the French President Nicolas Sarcozy and his wife Cecilia. A closer inspection reveals that all the other news of the year were negative, however, none found a place on the BBC website. Instead, the BBC covered the one of international dimensions. Internal affairs of negative or positive nature were neglected.

Degrees of Engagement With a view of topics covered about foreign countries, the following classification explores what stories relate to different types of relations between the host country and the covered one. The corpus includes all the articles on the BBC website about Bulgaria and four other countries: Belgium, Finland, Denmark, and Portugal for the year 2008. The coding categories include a cline of degrees of engagement between the UK, the home country of the broadcaster, and the respective countries evolved from the material: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

The two countries are in physical proximity Collaboration between the countries International events Crime international EU business Economic issues International diplomacy Parallels are drawn with events and evaluations in the other country People from one country visit the other

Content Analysis

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10. A FIRST in a rank list 11. Common past 12. Immigration 13. Citizen action 14. Tragic incidents 15. Weird incidents 16. Government 17. Unclassified Table 2.7 below shows the number of articles published for each category in absolute numbers: Belgium The two countries are in physical proximity Collaboration between the countries International events Crime International EU business Economic issues International diplomacy Parallels are drawn with events and evaluations in the other country People from one country visit the other A FIRST in a rank list event Common past Immigration Citizen action Tragic incidents Weird incidents Government Unclassified Totals

Finland

Denmark

Portugal

Bulgaria

Total

5

5

2

2

1 12 3 2

1 2 4 1

3 8 4 1

2

6

5

4

1

2 14 1 55

1 4 3 46

7

1

5 9 2 6 1 2 1 27

14 6 4 4

6 37 22 8 4 13

51 3

2 3 2

1 1 5

1 1 2

4

3 1 4 3

63

63

46

7 15 6 11 6 23 5 237

Table 2.7. Degrees of engagement between countries in international coverage

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The table reveals that the greatest number of articles refers to the case of people from one country visiting the other. Second come stories of international crime, followed by EU business and government. Immigration and parallels between the countries also evoked a lot of coverage. It is understandable that articles are published about the fate of UK people visiting the respective countries. The stories confirm the cultural stereotype that Portugal and Bulgaria have resorts frequented by UK residents. Most of the items, notably, also feature a great degree of negativity – drowning, a trial for murder, accusations of bad parenting etc. Having in mind the second place of crime stories as such, negativity is a factor vastly represented in the corpus, quite in line with Galtung and Ruge’s classifications of newsworthiness. The number of stories is quite significant when it comes to the issue of immigration. Nine such stories are published about Muslim immigrants to Denmark; three – about Belgium and three about Bulgaria. However, the case of Bulgaria differs in the fact that Bulgarians are the immigrants featured, and the setting is the UK, unlike the cases of the other countries. A notable fact also is the terminology used – in the only article where a British person living in Bulgaria is mentioned, the word “immigrant” is never used – although the woman is described as “originally from Wallsend on North Tyneside ... lived in Bulgaria with her husband for several years”. Likewise, the UK person who lives in Belgium is called “expat” rather than “immigrant”. Another category where Bulgaria occurs as often as the other countries is EU business. The number of articles for each country is 4 or 5. Six articles have been published about Bulgaria but the essence is different. While for the other countries the articles discuss policies and issues, for Bulgaria the BBC has publicised decisions criticising Bulgaria and threatening punishment. One of the articles is a direct criticism of the lenient attitude to Eastern European countries of the issue of green-house emissions. Two factors are predetermined by conditions out of the control of the medium: physical proximity and common past. Belgium is the only country with a sea border with the UK, which is why its coverage includes stories of proximity. Common past is established as a relation to the Vikings in the stories about Denmark; as relations between the Danish and British royal families; as the fight against fascism in the coverage of Belgium. Bulgaria remains outside this category with no common borders or past, or even struggles against fascism.

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Only two stories are published about joint projects between UK organisations and partners from other countries. Both are about Belgium. Obviously this is not a newsworthy topic on the BBC website. Interesting decision-making editorial policies apply to the selection of rank lists to be covered. Neither of the rank lists published on the website features the UK in a top position. Three such stories are found about Denmark and one – about Portugal. Whether this is a sign of appreciation for the respective country or self-criticism for the low success of the UK is a debatable issue. However, Bulgaria does not feature in this category either. The anti-power-bloc tendencies of the media are reflected in the fact that for all the countries in the sample the BBC covered civil protests against the authorities. Citizen action is not reported only from Denmark. With the exception of Bulgaria, there is at least one weird story from each country. There is a whole series of articles which are published to provide a parallel for the situation in the UK. Some of them are presented as a review of the situation in European countries; some countries are picked up as landmarks for good practices – especially Finland for standards of healthy living and effective schooling. Table 2.8 outlines the topics. Notable is the absence of Bulgaria in this category. Parallels

Belgium

Finland

Denmark

Nation or state?

Is five too soon to start school?

A positive attitude to disability

Euthanasia: a continent divided

Can a village really make you healthy? UK schools slip down global table Not all going on a summer holiday Attitudes to alcohol in Europe Baltic neighbours face alcohol crisis

The most spied upon people in Europe How Europe tackles drinkdriving Scandinavian split on sexist ads Ships on legs

Table 2.8. Stories of International comparison

Portugal

Bulgaria

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The conclusion from this category is that Bulgaria is never evoked for contrasts with the UK or other countries in the coverage on the BBC website. Further research will be needed to establish whether this is a sign of reluctance to consider Bulgaria on a par with other EU countries. Table 2.10 shows what type of stories were published about Bulgaria and what – not. Stories in the coverage of Bulgaria (number) Crime International 14 People from one country visit the other 7 EU business 6 Economic issues 4 International diplomacy 4 Tragic incidents 4 Immigration 3 Government 3 Citizen action 1

Never included The two countries are in physical proximity Collaboration between the countries International events Parallels are drawn with events and evaluations in the other country A FIRST in a rank list Common past Weird incidents

Table 2.10. Available and unavailable stories about Bulgaria With the obvious lack of natural associations, such as physical proximity, common past, joint projects, Bulgaria is covered for crime stories and unfortunate events for holiday-makers from England, as a source of (unwanted) immigration and as the recipient of EU sanctions. The BBC shows so little interest in the country that it does not even cover weird stories and never includes it in international comparisons. Of course, the data for this corpus span only one year and the comparison is made with only four countries, but the emerging image is far from positive. Obviously, in view of this CA, Bulgaria cuts an unfavourable profile on the BBC website.

Participant Roles A category suggested from other image studies is what role is given to Bulgarian participants in the media coverage. This, however, does not refer to grammatical categories, such as Affected Participant, Actor etc. The concrete categories are evolved from the accumulation of the data, as an ethnographic content analysis. The corpus for 2011 is explored for these criteria. The following categories emerge from the data – the figure indicates the number of the stories:

Content Analysis

o o o o o o o o o o

41

Bulgaria or Bulgarians active participants in events (21) Bulgaria is the setting (10) Bulgaria implicated (7) Bulgaria affected by international action (7) Casually mentioned (5) Bulgaria and its people featured (5) In an enumeration (3) Officials of Bulgarian origin speak out(2) Bulgaria in rank lists (2) As benchmark (1)

Table 2.11 shows the articles associated with each of these categories. Bulgaria or Bulgarians active participants in events (21)

Sister worried for Siddique murder accused Toby Siddique murder trial: Sister bought plane ticket Toby Siddique murder trial: Witness denies gang links Toby Siddique murder trial: 'Plan to beat' businessman Tenerife beheading: Jennifer Mills-Westley inquest opens Tenerife beheading suspect 'treated in Welsh hospital' Tenerife beheading suspect 'treated in Welsh hospital' Family of woman beheaded in Tenerife issues statement Jennifer Mills-Westley beheading suspect 'was wanted' Judge detains man accused of beheading UK woman Beheaded UK woman named as Jennifer Mills-Westley Tenerife: Inquiry into beheading of British woman Beheaded UK woman named as Jennifer Mills-Westley Tenerife: British woman beheaded in Canaries attack Tenerife: British woman beheaded in attack in Canaries Buckingham University student wins £500 over harassment Two more jailed over cruise ship drug smuggling plot Cigarettes worth £1.9m seized in North Shields Lorry driver arrested after crash with van in Selby Darfur: Bulgarian UN air crew freed in Sudan Three Bulgarian UN air crew members abducted in Darfur

As the setting (10)

Second Expendables stuntman in 'stable condition' Expendables 2 stuntman dies on set Carlisle teenager Tom McNeill dies on Bulgaria holiday Katie Edwards plays in World Deaf Futsal Championships Plot to capture Hitler in Lympne Lisa Jayne Dann fashioning Leeds Ten years on: Foot and mouth revisited Melrose Resources reveals exploration plans Melrose Resources starts exploration drive Melrose Resources looks elsewhere for oil

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Bulgaria implicated (7)

Gaddafi: 'Libya funded Sarkozy's French poll campaign' Libya protests: Second city Benghazi hit by violence As it happened: Mid-East and North Africa protests Libya not immune to winds of change Libya protests: Death in al-Bayda as unrest spreads Libya protests leave 24 dead, says rights group Dutch tulips impounded by Romania Duncan Smith urges firms to hire unemployed Britons

Bulgaria affected by international action (7)

Schengen zone: Delay for Bulgaria and Romania to join Restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian workers extended Early asparagus crop in Cornwall 'due to weather' Postal union charity convoy heads from Hull to Bulgaria Missile warheads stolen from Romanian train Romania's customs chief sacked after corruption charges Start-up Stories: NR Narayana Murthy, Infosys Edinburgh Council leader Jenny Dawe gets back to basics Last survivors of the Holocaust keep memories alive Channel Islands' EU director aims to visit islands Channel Islands appoint representative in Brussels

Casually mentioned (5)

Bulgaria and its people featured (5)

In an enumeration (3) Officials of Bulgarian origin speak out(2) Bulgaria in rank lists (2) As benchmark (1)

Krumovgrad gold mine fears divide Bulgarian villagers Bulgaria's snail farming 'goldrush' Bulgarian rally links Roma to organised crime Bulgaria arrests Roma leader amid growing ethnic unrest Bulgaria demands Libya return 2007 pay-off over nurses David Cameron and the European People's Party Measles alert as Sussex and Surrey schools report cases Gazprom signs three European gas pipeline partners Antonyia Parvanova, Bulgarian liberal EU demands action to tackle Roma poverty Europe's virus victims revealed Net access: EU survey shows geographic divisions Greeks will have 'Bulgarian salary with London prices'

Table 2.11. Roles of the Bulgarian participants in the coverage for 2011. The greatest number of articles features Bulgarians as active participants. In effect, two people are written about and both are accused of murder. Quite unlike observations made by other researchers e.g. Pietikäinen’s (2003) that an ethnic group may be degraded by assigning it a passive role in the articles about it in the press, Bulgarians appear degraded by assigning them active roles in the coverage on the BBC website. In this corpus, the longest thread of stories is about two violent murders committed by Bulgarian immigrants, covered with 11 and 5 articles, respectively. Further, two of the articles are about Bulgarian

Content Analysis

43

traffickers. Three articles cover the abduction and release of Bulgarian sailors by pirates. One article is about compensations awarded to a Bulgarian student for sexual harassment at an English University. Therefore, Bulgarians are active participants in cases of criminal offence and twice fewer articles report Bulgarians affected by crimes committed to them. This type of active participation hardly contributes to a positive image of the country. The second category – Bulgaria as the setting – is about famous actors who suffered accidents while making films in Bulgaria, and fewer are about an English teenager’s tragic death while on holiday in Bulgaria. The idea that people are injured or even die when they visit the country adds a negative touch to Bulgaria’s image. Further, the country provides terrain for the operations of a British company – which is one of the few nontragic events reported from Bulgaria. The category “Bulgaria is implicated” includes articles about the unrest in Libya, where the arrest and trial of six Bulgarian medics is always mentioned as an event affecting Europeans in that remote African country. The hint is that their release relates to a shady connection between the then French president and the compromised Libyan leader Gaddafi. Bulgaria is described as affected by international action when EU institutions punish Bulgaria, most notably - the country is refused admission to the Schengen area. Restrictions for workers from Bulgaria in the UK are also covered. The number of casual mentions is equal to the number of materials where Bulgaria features as the main topic – both categories include 5 articles. This can be indicative of occasional interest. In terms of a previous coding schedule, the latter category presents a kind of mediuminduced articles, inasmuch as reporters visited Bulgaria to produce stories about the country. Unlike the corpus for 2007, where the tendency was to steer clear of topics about Bulgarian society, this one includes two films: about snail farms and gold-mining in Bulgaria. The other two materials feature criminal action – the arrest of a Roma leader. The fifth article concerns once again the case of the Bulgarian medics in Libya. Inasmuch as the coverage of social stories from Bulgaria is a new feature of the BBC reporting on Bulgaria since the coverage for 2007 and 2008, a qualitative analysis of the materials is in order. The nature of the materials is important, as well as their availability. In the film about snail farming the camera moves carefully avoiding – but not quite – the flaking walls of tiny local houses, the rusty tanks in which water is kept. At the same time, while the reporter identifies Bulgaria as “the poorest country in the European Union”, with the local farmers “feeling the pinch of the

44

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collapse of the communist-era state farms”. The camera dollies behind a herd of goats, treading a muddy farm yard, zooms in on an elderly lady knitting on a bench in front of her house and is stopped by cows blocking a gravel path in the village. The editorial comment is that Bulgarians are hoping to benefit from satisfying the tastes of “tables far away, in France and Italy”. Thus Bulgaria is presented as a poor farmers’ society whose riches can come from deliveries to richer nations. Furthermore, one of the snail farmers admits that the idea for the business was borrowed from France, the model for improvement of the economy to be emulated. Likewise, in the material about gold mining, an interviewee claims that the Canadian technology should not be as dangerous as Bulgarian methods. Thus Bulgaria is given the status of a country which needs to look up to others for ideas about economic development. A (gold) rush associated with snails builds up an image which is an oxymoron. The second video material also hinges on a metaphor – a Bulgarian village literally sitting on gold opposes mining it because it fears that the peace and quiet of the region would be disturbed. The reportage from a Bulgarian village where gold has been discovered and a Canadian company is about to start excavations juxtaposes extreme poverty - cows, unkempt fields, poor villagers - to tidy offices and a neatly- architectured village centre. The video begins with the metaphor that the village is sitting on gold, but there is resistance to mining for it. Then the camera pans over poor houses, a frail elderly lady lifts a heavy load on her back and a man draws water from a well. The picture fades into the next one – of a modern street with well-dressed young people, as a local resident says “We have everything; we don’t want a mine here.” When the arguments of the speakers are outlined – mainly because the village is “unspoiled” - the camera zooms in on a donkey, small but obstinate in its unflinching position. Thus the image proposes a metaphor for the position of the locals. At the words that the government has already granted concession for the area, the camera shows a flock of turkeys dispersing as an elderly man throws seeds to feed them – another metaphoric evaluation of the way that the talk of unwillingness to launch the project will dissolve. One of the proponents of the project – introduced as “teacher” directly states that the methods of the Canadian company are different from the Bulgarian methods, where the argument is that the latter are presumably unacceptable. The category “people who are given the floor to speak” in this corpus includes Members of the European Parliament. The coverage is part of reports from the European Parliament and not specifically dedicated to Bulgaria. The small proportion of Bulgarian quotations, which can be

Content Analysis

45

characterised as restricted use of Bulgarians as sources (van Dijk, 1991) is confirmed by the data here. Two Bulgarians speak on behalf of their groups in the European Parliament, but none of the statements bears relation to their nationality. The expert on the case of the Bulgarian medics sentenced in Libya is a Cambridge scholar, not a Bulgarian one. Whenever a Bulgarian institution is quoted, its spokesperson remains anonymous. The only authoritative speaker is the Bulgarian Prime Minister when he demands the Libyan debt, waived years ago in the hope of freeing the medics. Two rank lists are reported where Bulgaria features: of computer viruses and (low) access to the Internet. Bulgaria is the country with the largest proportion of viruses affecting locally owned computers and Bulgaria has the lowest proportion of families linked to the Internet, respectively. The BBC highlights the criteria for the UK, which are not good, either. The most striking case of including Bulgaria is as a benchmark of poverty. Without other links to the country, in a story about the financial situation in Greece, an anti-austerity protester is quoted saying that Greeks will have to live on Bulgarian salaries at London prices. To conclude from this corpus, Bulgarians are not passive participants in the stories on the BBC website. They are active, but in the role of murderers. Significantly, these are Bulgarian immigrants offending against UK citizens. This reinforces the thesis that elite media select poor countries for stories of heinous crime and focus on negativity rather than on any other sphere of life. Thus the criterion for “inactive roles attributed to national groups” does not hold up to scrutiny – negative as is the effect of passivity, activity can draw an even more ominous image. Being given a voice proves a significant factor for boosting the image of the country. In the case of Bulgaria, the most revealing fact is that nonBulgarian experts are invited to comment on Bulgarian problems. Bulgarian voices are only heard on one occasion. This type of coverage does not allow the country to speak for itself, to express opinions, initiate action etc, which is particularly detrimental to its image. Selecting which rank lists to quote reflects an attitude to a country. The accumulation of negative rank lists topped by the same country does create an image of negativity. Furthermore, a tell-tale sign is employing the country as a benchmark of something. In the case of Bulgaria this is poverty. On the other hand, Bulgarian society at last has attracted some interest, unlike in the other corpora for this study. However, the picture is marked by poverty and retarded-ness, which reinforces once again the thesis about

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the coverage of poor countries. Thus coverage of social stories cannot be considered an unequivocal criterion for attributing a higher value to a country. Qualitative analysis should supply data what image is sought or created.

Thematic Threads Following is a study of a corpus of all the articles about Bulgaria published on the website of the BBC over the year 2010. The categories for the Content Analysis are evolved from the data in a manner proposed for Ethnographic CA. The rationale and manner are outlined in detail. The conclusion from the corpus for 2007 seemed to be that for Bulgaria mostly the rubric of crime is employed. In 2010, however, the situation appeared altered. The crime stories about Belgium outnumber those for Bulgaria. However, the tendency to cover fewer social stories about Bulgaria persists, as well as the avoidance of social, cultural or economic stories. It may be that only the coverage of crime closely correlates with reality, while other concerns guide the publication of social and cultural stories. Therefore, more qualitative methods need to be sought to offer a satisfactory explanation of what stories are covered about a country. Table 2.4 is repeated here for clarity. Crime Society Regional Affairs Economy Entertainment & Culture EU Business Science And Technology Total

Belgium 43 38 0 7 7 14 0 109 items

39,4% 34,8% 0 6,4% 6,4% 12,8% 0

Bulgaria 13 0 2 1 2 16 1 35 items

37,1% 0 5,7% 2,8% 5,7% 45,7% 2,8%

Table 2.4. BBC coverage of Bulgaria and Belgium for 2010 In an effort to compare the coverage of countries, entities of a similar size were juxtaposed for the years 2007-8. The assumption that they would be given equal attention on the BBC website, however, was rejected. The amount of attention did not appear to be affected by size. Instead, indications were found that former communist countries receive a specific treatment by elite media. Thus, the members of the former communist bloc

Content Analysis

47

could be expected to experience a similar attitude from the BBC. Therefore, the next corpus compares the coverage of Bulgaria, Poland and Romania, together with Belgium for comparative purposes. Further distinctions also exist, as Bulgaria and Romania are relatively new members of the European Union, but Poland is an already established member. Along with the numbers, of interest are also the topics of the articles. To establish the topics, so far the rubrics on the website were employed. However, the method proved flawed when trying to collect data from more than one year. Two years later, the rubrics on the website had changed. Secondly, and more importantly, many articles had reference to more than one rubric – e.g. the lawsuit against the alleged murderers of a building entrepreneur is at the same time about business relations, the legal system and crime. It does not seem reasonable to classify it under all three, and it is equally wrong to ignore aspects of the story. For the corpus for 2010 the articles are grouped into thematically connected groups, and their analysis leads to the topics covered to develop an argument about a country. Comparing the coverage of the four countries is expected to lead to conclusions about the way representations are created. The coding schedule focuses on the rationale for publishing an article. On the one hand, journalists follow an event as it evolves over time. A story often spawns several developments and the coverage traces their natural course. This is what I shall call continuous coverage. Commitment to its unbroken coverage reveals interest in the topic, because the option always exists to drop the story. However, the length of the coverage depends entirely on the story. A second type of coverage is when several unrelated occurrences follow a thematic line. Such events are connected by a similarity in the values underpinning what is happening. This is what I intend to call a thematic thread. Although the concrete happenings covered by the multitude of stories may appear disconnected, take place at different times and locations, a theme can be seen to unfold with them. In this case, the medium seeks out opportunities to engage with the topic, unravel new aspects of what is seen a significant theme. The level of involvement with the topic is greater than for a story with continuous coverage. The coding schedule here adheres to the occasions which called into existence the articles.

Chapter Two

48 Poland (261) President’s Death (74 ) Immigration (44) Disasters (31) Elections (24) War memories (24) Intl Politics (23) Social life (16) Music and Dance (6) Records (6) Science (4) World Cup Bid (4) Animal welfare (4)

28,30% 16,80% 11,80% 9,10% 9,10% 8,80% 6,10% 2,20% 2,20% 1,50% 1,50% 1,50%

Romania (123) Roma deportation (34) Animal welfare (11) Economic news (10) Antiausterity protests (9) Inclement weather (9)

27% 8,90% 8,10% 7,30% 7,30%

Immigration (8)

6,50%

Britons in Romania (6) Relations with Russia(6) Music and dance(5) Failing Health System(5) Ceausesco’s grave(4) EU criticism(4) War memories(3) Aid from abroad(3)

4,80% 4,80% 4% 4% 3,20%

Bulgaria (62) Roma deportations (22) EU nominee (11) EU criticism (8) Visuals (4) Crime (3) Relations with Russia (3) Britons in Bulgaria (2) Inclement weather in Eu (2) Sports events (2) Aid from abroad (2) John the Baptist (1) Music and dance (1) Economic news (1)

35% 17% 12% 6,00% 4,80% 4,80% 3,20% 3,20% 3,20% 3,20% 1,60% 1,60% 1,60%

3,20% 2,40% 2,40%

Table 2.12. Thematic lines in the coverage of three ex-communist countries Compared to the ex-communist countries, Belgium’s coverage is entirely different: Belgium (133) 1.Sex abuse scandal (14)

10.5%

2. Travel issues (11)

8.2%

3. Future of EURO (11)

8.2%

4. Local incidents (11)

8.2%

5. Cultural exchange (11)

8.2%

6. Economic issues (10)

7.5%

7. Trafficking (9)

6.7%

8. War memories (9)

6.7%

9. Governance (8)

6.0%

10. Travel havoc (7)

5.2%

11. EU presidency (7)

5.2%

12. Burka Ban (6)

4.5%

Content Analysis

13. Crime intnl (5)

3.7%

14. World Cup Bid (4)

3%

15. Science (4)

3%

16. Others (4)

3%

17. F1 (2)

1.5%

49

Table 2.13. Themes in the coverage of Belgium Number 2 and 5 in the list above demonstrate the category continuous coverage, which was established with the methodology above. The coverage of the traffic havoc obviously traces the meteorological conditions and their impact on travellers. The BBC published so many articles because of the magnitude of the story and the impact on numerous readers/viewers/users of the website. We can say that this is a public story unfolding at the time and the BBC cannot but cover it. Likewise, the skydiving death also evolves with time – the same participants, the same event undergoes development over time, until the murderer is sentenced in court. On the other hand, the sex abuse scandal, topic number 1, includes articles from different countries, different participants; different aspects are picked up with each article. It looks as if the BBC reporters are on the look-out for more of the same, probably because they are eager to delve further into the issue and its implications. That is why I call this a thematic thread. With such coverage, I believe the medium tries to highlight an issue and attract public interest. While continuous coverage is stuck on actual developments of the story – and the medium has little control over what needs to be covered next - thematic threads are issues where the medium builds a discourse steeped in values and projecting an attitude. Continuous coverage may later develop into a thematic thread, when the journalists are ready to place the event together with others related to a value, or problem in society, make sense of it as a springboard for ideas. Several long stories do not do that, for example, travel havoc due to freak weather conditions. The first thematic thread about Belgium raises the sensitive issue of sex abuse by Catholic priests. Several moral issues are evoked with the coverage. On the one hand, the victims’ lives have been irreparably damaged, on the other, the church, while claiming moral authority, does not seem to accept responsibility or offer remedy to those who suffered at the hands of its officials. The BBC writers distance themselves from the promises made by the church to tackle the issue by describing the actions prefaced with verbs such as “pledge to”, the future ‘to’ infinitive and

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placing the words of officials between inverted commas. The effect is achieved to show that so far only words are spoken rather than actions taken. The second contentious issue broached with a thematic thread also has international existence although it began life in Belgium, which fact is acknowledged in all the articles. This is the case of banning the Islamic veil, the burka. On the one hand, the ban infringes on the rights of Muslim women, but on the other it creates security problems, goes counter to European values and lifestyles. The BBC presents the issue as a dilemma, as can be seen from the title of one of the articles: A veiled threat or an attack on faith. The pun there suggests that wearing veils can threaten the security of citizens, but also – that the issue may threaten inter-religious relations. The coverage seeks out different viewpoints – of the MP who proposed the legislative act, of Islamic women for and against the veil. In all the articles, however, Belgium is acknowledged as the trail blazer of a trend which raises problems – so far, too few to make a change - but important to consider in the broad context of a multicultural society. A link is made with Britain – the situation there, an MP suggesting a similar ban, a glossary of the different types of veils worn by Muslim women; even Emily Pankhurst and her ideas are brought into the argument. This thematic thread provides space for a discussion of multicultural issues from many points of view, highlighting, of course, Belgium as the initiator of contentious legislative activity. The topic of separatism in Belgium is traced in great detail. Firstly, the news of a local election is announced with a focus on the linguistic division between French and Dutch speakers, the difference in the economic development of the two parts, the bilingual capital and the political divisions ensuing from the split. When election results come through, the leading party is named with a phrase which features its position in relation to the rivalry - Flemish Separatist - in the title of the publication. Little else is revealed about it. The video coverage begins with images of the party leader and his statements, but swiftly moves on to the dissatisfaction of the French speaking part with the possible split of the country, presented as inevitable in view of the party winning the election. The claim that the country is based on the collaboration between the two communities is formulated by the BBC reporter himself and because it also wraps up the report, it does sound as the editorial voice. Further in the thematic thread this topic is linked to Belgium assuming the presidency of the EU. The video opens with a ballet spectacle dedicated to the event and the seemingly unserious opening is linked to the news that a government will be difficult to form in Belgium because consensus between the parties

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does not exist and is hard to find. A British MEP states that Belgium is used to having no government and hopes this will pass unnoticed. Thus Brussels is presented as the capital of Europe, which is, in fact, the capital of a country torn by ethnic and linguistic differences. The image comes across as a spectacle of unity for a city meant to unite, but which is itself disunited; the seat where consensus is to be reached among European partners but stirs conflicts among its own people who speak different languages and differ in economic development instead. At the same time other thematic threads highlight moral issues of less contentious nature. Memories from World Wars 1 and 2 connected with British veterans make Belgium a place for homage journeys of British people. Titles such as “Somerset cadets 'humbled' by WWI pilgrimage to Ypres” and “Attwood pays tribute to war 'sacrifice' of great-uncle” reveal why the British go back to war memories. The vocabulary choices pilgrimage, humble, tribute and sacrifice speak of high moral values, of worship and religious veneration. The stories mainly feature British war heroes and their modern posterity, where Belgium is just the backdrop – a place to venerate and go on journeys named pilgrimages. The efforts of the police forces of different countries to combat terrorists are meticulously covered wherever they occur. The thematic thread is one of international police collaboration against the modern threat of terror. Belgium is seen as an active participant with several articles. From the continuous coverage it becomes clear that the country is preparing for a bid to host the European championship on football, an English couple passes through Belgium en route their moped journey round Europe, a beer brewing castle is burnt in a fire, the country is preparing for the Formula One competition, a singer is exposed of fraud and a British entertainer dies while touring Belgium. All these articles report events without contributing to an argument about the country. Therefore, the thematic threads for Belgium are the following: Sex abuse scandal (14) War memories (9) EU presidency (7) Burka Ban (6) Crime intnl (5)

10.5% 6.7% 5.2% 4.5% 3.7%

The thematic groups about Poland are distributed among thirteen lines. As can be seen, the lion share goes to the tragic death of the Polish President. Of the others, stories of disaster and immigration loom large.

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The topics are varied, and except for the tragic death and the disasters, they are generally positive. The thematic groups The President’s death, Disasters and Election are typical of what I called continuous coverage. The coverage of the election follows a well-established media scheme – details about the candidates, sociological predictions of the results, reports of voting, exit-poll results etc. The violent and unusual death of Polish dignitaries, for its part, takes a less predictable course and blends into the topic of Russian-Polish strained relations, but is still an evolving story traced with continuous coverage. The topic of disasters is also in response to actual events rather than a consciously developed argument. The topic of immigration, however, presents a thematic thread, very significant in the coverage of Poland. The stories appear to split into four subgroups: crime, beneficial aspects, legal issues and the Polish going back home, thus balancing negativity with positive aspects. The better part of the articles combine immigration with murder: a woman killing her partner while heavily intoxicated; a man murdering the wife and child of a friend who gave him a place to stay in England; a kind pensioner killed by an immigrant he was hospitable to. The Polish nationality of the killers is always revealed, and several details of the suffering of the victims are highlighted, thus sympathising with the victims and putting the blame on the perpetrators. The reports of the court cases often evoke the (lacking) linguistic abilities of the Polish people. Thus the moral of this thematic thread should read: we give them a home but they kill our people. Obviously, counterbalance is sought for the negative stories of criminality among the immigrants. Success stories of Polish people in England and Scotland occur on the BBC website as biographies and obituaries of glitterati of Polish origin: Mandelbrot, who discovered mathematical shapes known as fractals while living in France; Ingrid Pitt, a Polish-born actress in Hollywood etc. The biography of a Polish journalist, however, provokes a discussion on ‘imaginative’ reporting from abroad: Ryszard Kapuscinski, called the most famous Polish foreign correspondent abroad, is highlighted because he played “fast and loose” with the facts. He is hardly mentioned in the report later, but starts off the discussion of irresponsible reporting. Success stories continue with a Polish immigrant turned boss of an enterprise starting from a worker; another immigrant bids to buy a substantial property in Scotland. The BBC also explicitly makes the claim that immigrants are good for the UK economy with stories such as: Polish workers reported to have saved a factory, Polish construction workers are much needed for building a hotel etc. Positive coverage is also given to outsourcing of famous English products to Poland – Twinings tea is about to be produced there. This

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thematic thread should read: Polish people can be good for the British economy. Special reports are dedicated to how Polish immigrants in the UK vote for their president; the Polish Ambassador visits the country to enquire about the working conditions of his countrymen; a consul is appointed for Jersy etc. A serious legal issue is the number of extradition orders from Poland: 40% of the cases at City of London’s Magistrates Court are from Poland. The BBC concludes that the English Extradition Law is too lenient on Polish orders, while conceding that Polish prisons are ‘inhuman and degrading’. This thread highlights the fact that if immigration is to exist, then the necessary legal instruments should be in place. Despite the effort to show immigration as a blessing, the BBC also reports that Polish people are going back home. The number of those going home is at its highest and there is a drop in the number of vacancies for lower qualifications (tacitly implying that immigrants opt for such jobs). In conclusion, we had better have our multiculturalism at home! For the thematic thread War Memories – recurring for all the countries researched, Poland offers rich material. Having been the setting for numerous war crimes, Poland is inevitably mentioned in reports commemorating victims, or punishing perpetrators. Additionally, the BBC brings up the theme of anti-Semitism in Poland. Reported as alive and kicking in the nineties, a change with the democratic reforms in recent years is highlighted. Holocaust and Auschwitz memories are now possible, together with the efforts to preserve Jewish heritage. As many as 20 stories on the BBC website give the message that communism was as antiSemitic, as fascism. The topic feeds into the issue of multiculturalism with the story of a Jewish man who was hiding his origins, until he realised his wife was also – secretly - Jewish. A special place is devoted to the Katyn massacre, in view of the fact that the commemorations are already (in 2010) attended by Russians as well, who (finally) admit that the Polish officers were massacred by the Russian secret police and not by Nazis. This thematic thread leads to the message that WW2 is to be always remembered and the victims – honoured, but it should not be forgotten that communism was as anti-Semitic and murderous as fascism. A long thread is dedicated to international relations. On the issue of building a defence system called Eagle Guardian, Wikileaks is quoted to qualify it as protection for Poland from its former partner Russia. At the same time, Poland is the object of a ‘charm offensive’ on the part of Russia, attracting Polish capital for the vast Russian market. Polish troops also take part in the Victory Parade in Moscow. As a staunch NATO ally, Poland is part of the forces in Afghanistan. The report includes an

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interview with a Polish General, who discusses the strategies of the coalition critically, and concludes with the words of Poles that they do not want their troops fighting there. The country is also reported to warn and arrest a Chechen separatist leader on a Russian warrant; an Israeli forfeiter of passports is arrested and handed over to Germany. Thus Poland appears a new democracy, abiding by the laws of the democratic West, while maintaining a relationship with Russia burdened with memories from a difficult past. A significant shade on this image is cast by CIA secret prisons located on Polish territory. The BBC describes Poland as “a region where, only a generation ago, people were subject to arbitrary detention and torture at the hands of Communist secret police”. Modern Poland, for its part, is reported to investigate the case, from “drab” premises, in a “slow” process, which is a vestige from the totalitarian past. Social life in Poland is a theme evoking immense interest for the BBC. Two articles and a video material are dedicated to the attitude of Catholic priests to In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) policies. In a non-partisan, distanced tone the BBC probe into the church-state relations on the issue. In another article BBC identifies Poland as the country with the toughest legislation against paedophiles and rapists, including a castration bill for rapists of children or relatives. Another topic connected to Poland as a staunchly Catholic country is the Europride parade to be held for the first time in Eastern Europe. Anti-gay attitudes are apparently overcome. Further, a lavishly Catholic pageant is shown to illustrate the beatification of Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest tortured and killed in 1984 by communist Poland's secret police for supporting Lech Walesa's Solidarity freedom movement. A special coverage is broadcast of the memorial service for the Gdansk ‘revolution’, as the BBC call it, thus developing the theme of anticommunist, anti-Soviet past of Poland. The Nobel Prize for Lech Valesa, a Polish dissident, is celebrated and Polish winners of the Goldman prize are announced. This thematic thread reveals a genuine interest in the moral basis of Polish society and the metamorphoses of Catholicisim in daily life. Animal welfare is a big issue for the BBC. Special coverage is given of the transfer of an extra big snake from Poland to England. A hippopotamus from an endangered species also make the journey from Poland to England. Thirdly, in the rubric for readers’ photographs a Polish man sends pictures of dog races in Poland. A special thematic thread – not without a relation to social life, is that of music. Celebrations of the anniversary of Chopin are covered with four articles. A Polish Jazz festival is reported with a focus on the fact that

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British people help Poles recover interest in jazz music, struggling under communism. Science and technology is another thematic thread where Poland attracted the interest of the BBC. The oldest dinosaur footprints are discovered by a Polish researcher, writing for the magazine Nature. Antennae are installed in Poland for a British telescope, as part of a scientific project. The coverage of the Polish bid to host the European football championship includes details about the humble past of the project coordinator, the boon to the economy the project is expected to give, but also – the improvement of Poland’s public image. “Alcohol abusers”, “deeply religious”, “manual labourers” are images the Polish would like to erase. The claims that corruption is involved are reported with a critical distance by the BBC. Through the voice of FIFA, a threat is directed at the accusers, who do not seem to provide evidence. The coverage of records is expected to be a general news value, however, such articles are only found in the coverage of Poland. Great attention is given to a statue of Christ bigger than the one in Brazil, intact with the Catholic image of the country. Thus, the thematic threads are different and multifaceted. They are: Immigration (44) War memories (24) Intl Politics (23) Social life (16) Music and Dance (6) Records (6) World Cup Bid (4) Animal welfare (4)

16,80% 9,10% 8,80% 6,10% 2,20% 2,20% 1,50% 1,10%

The thematic threads about Romania are connected with serious moral dilemmas, just like the thematic threads in the coverage of Belgium. First and foremost is the topic of repatriating Roma immigrants from France back to Romania. On the surface of it the BBC traces the reactions of the institutions of the European Union, the Romanian President, even the Pope. The argument is made that the right to free movement of EU citizens is violated by the repatriation and several authorities appeal against the move of the French president Sarcozy. The BBC, however, go further than voicing the words of officials. They send a reporter to investigate the living conditions of the Roma people in Romania, and scenes of extreme poverty appear in his report. On the other hand, a

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scheme is reported siphoning off British tax-payer money to Romania, allegedly to fund local criminal gangs. Thirdly, Roma leaders are portrayed as living in luxury while forcing girls into prostitution, children into begging and theft and leaving ordinary members of the community in extreme poverty. Seemingly with no connection to the thread is the story of a 10-year old Roma immigrant to Spain who gave birth to a baby, thus suggesting dubious practices in Roma communities. A second long thread is the coverage of economic topics, such as the hope of companies in older EU members to improve their financial situation by expanding into Eastern Europe, seen as a new market. At the same time reports admit that the profits are not high or falling in specific cases. This is a thematic thread where Romania is featured in enumerations, rather than as a stand-alone economy. However, the missed opportunities for growth are clearly seen. A big thematic thread reveals Romanian immigrants in the UK as victims of crime, but also – as perpetrators. An obituary is dedicated to a woman killed in the London bombing who was happy to find a job and live in England but her life was cut short by the terrorists. A series of articles are about a stabbing committed on Boxing Day, with the body left in a nursery. It involves two Romanians – the suspect and the victim. The event clearly stirs several sensitive issues – a violent crime, committed on a Holy day with children exposed to the consequences. A second case is reported as a moral lesson: three Romanian car washers kicked and beat an English man to rob him of J4. The judge’s words – very similar to a teacher’s homily to misbehaving first-grade students – are quoted verbatim: that it is cowardly to attack one man in a group of three, with extreme violence and for no obvious reason. Another case appears odd rather than violent – a Romanian fruit picker dazzled the eyes of an RAF pilot with a laser pen, which nearly caused him to crash. The perpetrator comes up with the childish admission that he was exploring the strength of the beam. In connection with the Roma thread, a couple from Romania is sentenced for sending children to beg and steal, making up to J100 000 per year from each child. The children were kept in poor conditions – one needed seven tooth extractions; despite promises to send the children to school, none of the victims was actually enrolled. To counteract the anti-immigration tone, the BBC publishes an article claiming that social workers will be needed from Romania, among other countries, to cope with social care in England. This thread reveals cruelty, poverty, but at the same time reckless, even childish behaviour on the part of Romanian emigrants, endangering the security of the host nation. The crimes quoted are notable for the stupidity of the perpetrators, their lack of very basic moral values.

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Although all the cases are newsworthy by the nature of what happened, the BBC never fails to acknowledge the nationality of those involved. Together with the coverage of Poland, the BBC seems to establish the topic of criminality and immigration. While for Poland the thematic thread of immigration forks into three different sub-themes – benefits from migrants, the migrants going home and criminal action, each balancing the other in negative and positive overtones – for Romania there is only one association: criminality, which is both absurd and heinous. The next thematic thread projects animal rights in Romania, where the help of the UK is seen as much needed. An interview with an Englishman is broadcast who created camps to save bears forced to dance by their captors in Greece, Turkey and Romania. Lions said to have lived in dilapidated and cramped conditions in Romania are transported to England and the story is followed through with pictures, sound and details. Princess Anne is mentioned as the benefactor for building a new enclosure for wolves in England, four of which have been “saved” from Romania. Animal welfare is obviously a great concern for the BBC and excommunist countries are seen as unaware of their rights. The people of Romania are also presented as being in need of charity. A feature film shows the improved conditions of orphans after the intervention of UK charities. Wellingtons are donated by an UK community for Romania. Poverty, coupled with neglect for the rights of the helpless in society comes across as a feature of life in Romania, where the UK intervenes to set things right. A thematic thread is devoted to the poor conditions in Romanian hospitals and the failing healthcare system. The hygiene in the hospitals is shown to be poor, drugs are insufficient, and doctors are poorly paid, because the system is under-funded. The characters in these stories are the 5-year old son of a poor family who died because he could not be treated and an opera singer with an incurable disease, thus stirring deep emotions for the pain and frustration of the patients. Quite unequivocal is the attitude to the graves of Elena and Nicolae Ceausesco, the former communist dictator of Romania and his wife. The story resembles continuous coverage, because reports trace the digging up of the graves, the investigations on the remains of the couple and the conclusions. However, the reason why this is classified as a thread is the history of the Romanian dictator’s rule, which makes the story a potent reminder of the past. On the opposite pole we have the thread of music, like in the case of Poland. A report is published about a dancer who achieved fame in Europe and subsequently – in the UK. Laudatory is also the tone of the articles

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about the Romanian contestant in the Eurovision song competition, who actually came third. This could be seen as a thread about the talent of the Romanian people, counter-balancing the negative threads so far. Like the coverage of Belgium, for Romania the BBC also takes up the subject of the Holocaust. There is extensive coverage of a Jewish immigrant’s visit of her hometown in Romania, when her birthplace brings back the memory of the Holocaust atrocity. On a different note, the Romanian Mint has to apologise for putting the image of an anti-Semitic figure on a new coin. A third story about discovering a Holocaust grave in Romania ends with the sentence: “It is only the second Holocaust-era mass grave discovered in Romania since 1945.” The hedge ‘only’ suggests a mild criticism that Romania seems to have forgotten the issue but forgetting the past is obviously a serious moral offence, in the eyes of the BBC. A richly illustrated thread presents the economic austerity measures as reducing poor Romanians to even greater poverty, against which backdrop the protests are seen as just and right. On this issue the BBC introduces an interactive component by opening its pages for the readers’ stories, thus obviously encouraging participation. Specific for Romania is the fact that when members of the police force strike, the president demands – and gets - the resignation of the Interior Minister. His withdrawal from the Cabinet is described with a very strong word – bereavement – and a video and an article are published on the occasion. The coverage of positive features is completed by a report of a new type of dinosaur discovered by Romanian scientists. The BBC quotes the Bulletin of the Romanian Academy of Science. It is a positive feature that the BBC reporters ever choose to look through such publications, generally considered inaccessible to the public. With an air of approval the BBC quotes also raids against a childsmuggling ring in Romania conducted with the help of the British police. The thematic thread of Romania – EU relations is enmeshed with that for Bulgaria. Both countries are criticised for organised crime and corruption. The discussion of this thread is presented with the data about Bulgaria. The thematic threads for Romania are also rich and multifaceted, although with a focus on poverty and deprivation, and criminality enmeshed with immigration:

Content Analysis

Roma deportation (34) animal welfare (11) Economic news (10) Anti-austerity protests (9) Immigration (8) Music and dance(5) Failing Health System(5) Ceausesco’s grave(4) EU criticism(4) War memories(3) Aid from abroad(3)

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27% 8,90% 8,10% 7,30% 6,50% 4% 4% 3,20% 3,20% 2,40% 2,40%

In conclusion, the image of Romania emerges as a poor country neglecting animal rights, showing little respect for the victims of the Holocaust, mistreating its Roma people, with a failing health system and in need of foreign donations. A noticeable effort has been made to counterbalance the negative nuances with reports of achievements in the entertainment industry and research results. For the longest line of its coverage Bulgaria appears together with Romania as the home country of the repatriated Roma people from France. Unlike the coverage of the Romanian Roma, however, there is no effort to trace back home the Bulgarian immigrants and reveal their living conditions here or eventual criminal doings. There is no official protest on the part of the Bulgarian government, unlike the case of the Romanian so it remains continuous coverage. A long thematic thread recounts the relations of Bulgaria with the EU. On this occasion the “tandem” with Romania is still retained, however, details about Bulgaria abound. A statement of the German and French foreign ministers is reported to the effect that the two countries will not be admitted to the Schengen area, unless they deal with corruption and organised crime. When it comes to reactions from those implicated, on the Romanian side, the President speaks out, boldly condemning the move as discrimination. On the Bulgarian side, however, the spokesperson of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs promises that Bulgaria will do “its utmost”. Further, Bulgaria is mentioned as a country with seriously flawed national statistics. Greece is evoked as the analogue, with about double higher figures for its budget deficit compared to those officially declared. However, the BBC publishes statistical data about Bulgaria from European research institutes. A rank list topped by Bulgaria is the one of the countries of origin of sex-labourers in the EU. Bulgaria comes third, after Romania and Russia. Unemployment is above the average, and life

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satisfaction is among the lowest in Europe, according to a Eurobarometer study. For the thematic thread EU-Bulgaria, the BBC speaks with the voices of Bulgarian officials on two occasions: the PM asks for Bulgarian Ambassadors revealed to have served for the Secret Services to be sacked and the President qualifies the move as “a political purge”; secondly, the Finance Minister criticises the EU for its slow reaction to the economic crisis and the dysfunctional institutions. The editorial comment adds that Bulgaria is the country with the smallest budget deficit among the 27 members, but this is immediately counterbalanced with the fact that it is the second poorest country. Poor, but disciplined, with a discerning Financial Minister – this is the message. The thematic thread of crime is dominated by legal action, rather than by criminal deeds. In view of the accusations that tougher penalties for organised crime are needed in Bulgaria, these articles should sound like a step in the right direction. The BBC quotes a Bulgarian English language newspaper that a local businessman and his wife have been jailed for embezzling funds from the European Sapard programme. A particularly high-profile case is that the former PM is accused of failing to return 7 secret files to his office before stepping down. Again the provision is made that they contain state secrets on “security and organised crime” – the leitmotif of the Bulgarian thematic thread of crime. Further on, the murderer of a mafia chronicler in Sofia is said to have been arrested on the day of the shooting. The suspects, however, have been on trial for other crimes for the fourth consecutive year. A significant feature of this thematic thread is that every story ends with the reminder that Bulgaria lost access to “more than 500m euros (£430m) of EU funding for failing to deal with corruption and organised crime”. The topic of relations with former Big Partner, Russia is revealed in two articles. In the first one the news about a contract for a gas pipe is pushed aside to highlight the present given to Putin by his Bulgarian hosts – a puppy. It softened the macho image of the Russian Prime Minister, as can be seen from the picture illustrating the article. In it Putin is holding the puppy tenderly and looks really melted by the sweetness of the young animal. The second article also gains significance from the illustration. It informs that Russia is to demand explanations from Bulgaria about the plans to host a US missile defence system on Bulgarian territory. All the details of the system – that it will be on Bulgarian and Romanian territory, that it replaces the plan to build such defence in Poland and the Czech Republic – are familiar from the publications about Romania. Romania is

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mentioned as taking part in official talks, replying to Russia, while Bulgaria is once again back-grounded. The thematic thread about the miserable conditions in Bulgaria backgrounds the country and focuses on the efforts of the volunteers to help. On one of the occasions, English teenage students raised the money to organise a creative Holiday club for children in Bulgaria. Misery is implicated in the story about a young child actor who is about to play “one of the sewer kids from Bulgaria.” Thirdly, an English football fan who dropped a rock on a Bulgarian barman and was sentenced to jail speaks of the “horrible experience” in the country. A reminder of the story is the fact that the parents of the person accuse the Liberal Democrats of using their alleged involvement in ‘saving’ the fan from a Bulgarian prison. The picture of drab existence and injustice looms behind such stories. The main bulk of the articles about Bulgaria, however, is of the type continuous coverage: tracing events as they evolve. Such an event is the hearing of the Bulgarian nominee for EU commissioner which goes through dramatic curves. The first choice, Rumiana Jeleva, withdraws pelted with accusations of illegal income and incompetence. Then a second candidate, Kristalina Gueorguieva is hailed as brilliant and subsequently approved. On no occasion, however, is Jeleva projected as a weak candidate because she comes from Bulgaria: the failure is blamed on an attack against the European People’s Party; on allegations of improper continuing engagement with her consultancy firm – later dismissed; on incompetence about the issue of Humanitarian aid. The BBC also highlights the inefficiency of the international mechanisms for action and the cumbersome procedure for selecting Commissioners of the EU, but not of any failing on the part of Bulgaria. A story with a relatively positive ring to it is the discovery of remains of the body of John the Baptist in Bulgaria. A short film shows the ceremony of opening the sarcophagus and blessing the remains by the local bishop. The text, however, poses two hedges – St John the Baptist is venerated mainly by the East Orthodox Church and that remains of his body have allegedly been found earlier in Iran. The main archaeologist in charge of the excavations is given the floor to explain that he considers his finding very precious for Bulgaria; the Bishop calls the remains “imperishable” but the report ends with the reporter’s voice-over that more test are expected to prove how genuine the finds are. A special film about Bulgaria presents a genre of music, very popular among the young, but frowned upon by educated people because of its low quality. The BBC reporter calls it “a guilty pleasure”. She interviews a young couple outside the pompous and loud atmosphere of a discotheque;

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shots are shown of wild dancing on tables and lewd gestures; the reporter specifically disapproves of the whiskey bottles around the club. Connections to organised crime are also mentioned. The fan has no better explanation to offer for her taste than the fact that the music is Balkan and she has enjoyed it ever since she was little. The singer herself, referred to as a “folk diva”, is also interviewed and explains that the music reflects the Bulgarian character and is there for people to relax and enjoy, rather than be burdened with problems. All the voices are Bulgarian with voiceover interpretation in English. The reporter admits that she cannot describe the style of the music but ventures “oriental, local folk, gypsy”, summarised finally as “a bit dumbed down”. The lyrics are acknowledged to be about how to get rich quickly, and therefore “not something to aspire to”. Although the reporter’s friends were dismissive of the music, they gladly joined her to the club. The impression is of an incomprehensible liking for oriental, flashy, fake lifestyles. In effect, the thematic threads in the coverage of Bulgaria are as follows: EU criticism (8) Crime (3) Relations with Russia (3) Aid from abroad (2)

12% 4,80% 4,80% 3,20%

The thematic threads about the four countries are presented in Table 2.14. The recurrent lines are indicated by underlining the themes. Belgium

Poland

Romania

Bulgaria

Sex abuse scandal (14) 10.5% War memories (9) 6.7% EU presidency (7) 5.2% Burka Ban (6) 4.5% Crime intnl (5) 3.7%

Immigration (44) 16,80% War memories (24) 9,10% Intl Politics (23) 8,80% Social life (16) 6,10% Music and Dance (6) 2,20% Records (6) 2,20% World Cup Bid (4) 1,50% Animal welfare (4) 1,10%

Roma deportation (34) 27% Animal welfare (11) 8,90% Economic news (10) 8,10% Anti-austerity protests (9) 7,30% Immigration (8) 6,50% Music and dance(5) 4% Failing Health System(5) 4% Ceausesco’s grave(4) 3,20% EU criticism(4) 3,20% War memories(3) 2,40% Aid from abroad(3) 2,40% Science (1)

EU criticism (8) 12% Crime (3) 4,80% Relations with Russia (3) 4,80% Aid from abroad (2) 3,20%

Table 2.14. Thematic threads in the coverage of Bulgaria

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To apprreciate the vaariety of topiics for each country, the thematic threads are ppresented as pie p charts.

Bulgaria ,0 ,0

aidd, 3.200%

relation s with Russia; 4,80%

Romania EU criticis m m, 12%

immigrati on; 6,50%

music & dance, 4%

roma deprtation s, 27%

antia austerity pro otests, 7.30%

crime, 4.80%

economic news, 8.10%

Poland

animal welfare, 8.90%

Belgium

records, 2.20% Music and dance, 2.20%

world cup bid, 1.50%

Social life, 6.10% Inteernati oonal pollitics, 8.80%

im mmigat ion, 116.80%

rime Cri IN NTL, 3.770% bu urka ban, 4.5 50% EU presidenc

War m memories 6,70%

Piechart 2.3. T Thematic threaads in the coveraage of four coun untries.

sex abuse scandal, 10.50%

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What is visible is the richness and variety in the coverage of Poland and Romania and the relative monotony in the stories from Bulgaria and Belgium. The concept of thematic threads sheds light on the “attack points”, or the contents of media coverage tailored to create an image for a country. For the ex-communist countries, through the corpus for this research the threads are: (1) immigration, associated with criminality but balanced with a few benefits for the economy of the host country and with the solace that the immigrants are going home; (2) the lessons of WWII crimes are enmeshed with the subtle message that communism was no less antiSemitic than fascism; (3) animal rights are often violated and Eastern Europeans are unaware of the fact that animals should be taken care of until British people get involved; (4) the countries need to improve their services; (5) relations with the former partner Russia, shown to doubt its ex-allies while they staunchly steer away from the old-times bloc. Whenever aid is mentioned, it is to highlight the noble efforts of the benefactors, leaving aside the presuppositions lurking behind the activities: Romanians are presumed to need Wellington boots - obviously, to tread the muddy streets of their country; Bulgarian children need camps for creative activities, apparently because their recreation is dull etc. It is the implications rather than the actual argument that put Bulgaria and Romania in a negative light. Some threads genuinely lead to negative appreciation – failure to conform to EU regulations, poor conditions of the health service etc. When such stories are felt to prevail in the coverage, counterbalances are sought. In the case of Romania, one is found in musical talent and research. For Bulgaria, however, both music and science prove of little comfort – the most popular music in Bulgaria turns out low quality and the archaeological finds – not really dodgy, but suspicious. Could it be bad luck, or did the BBC persistently run into negative aspects of life in Bulgaria – this can only be seen through historical analysis, by comparing which subjects were not covered. A cline of rapprochement between East and West is clearly seen from Poland to Bulgaria. Poland is presented as fully integrated in European practices: in legal and military co-operation, in acceptance of moral values etc. Relics of the communist past, however, surface in most publications: drab offices, slow procedures, memories of human rights’ neglect, even jazz could not be fully appreciated during communism. Bulgaria and Romania, for their part, remain fully entrenched in fraudulent practices, crime and corruption which make them unacceptable to the European Union. While Romania is comparable to Western democracies in its brave

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citizen society struggling against what they see as injustice, Bulgaria does not even live up to this standard. When the Bulgarian Prime Minister makes a statement that the residue from the past should be put behind, the BBC avidly quotes him, but everything remains at a declarative stage. While for Poland communism is but a shade from the past, for Bulgaria and Romania the hint does not even exist that they are equal to the other countries in the EU. For Poland we even see that the country is slowly waking to the realisation that American practices are oftentimes unacceptable from a European Human Rights point of view – as is the case with the CIA prisons on Polish territory and the military involvement in Afghanistan, despite the fact that alliances with America is seen as a step forward from communist isolation. Thematic threads proceed from values considered universal. On the one hand these are human rights – of movement, welfare, freedom to worship and maintain one’s own lifestyles. On the other hand multicultural society is placed in focus, together with its problems. Thirdly, and quite equivocally, attitudes to history make the headlines: veneration of heroic acts and compassion for the suffering of victims of historic atrocities. A cline is observable from Belgium, where the heroes of the past are held in awe, through Poland where the reminder lurks that communism was no less discriminatory than fascism, to Romania where anti-semitism has already come under criticism as a crime. Bulgaria remains outside this thread. No less attention is given to animal welfare. Crime continues to be a source of interest, but with a special reference to multicultural society and economics. Organised crime, corruption and mafia are frequently mentioned but the cases constituting them differ significantly and the reader remains baffled what actually constitutes the nature of these crimes. For Belgium the contrast with the coverage of the three ex-communist countries is stark – no crime and corruption, no fraudulent statistics, no EU directives to improve up to European standards. One may say that the lack of such themes leaves plenty of space to discuss moral issues, or to focus on achievements. The question remains whether the reality dictates such media reflections, or the journalists seek them out in accordance with existing stereotypes. Bulgaria appears linked to very few of the moral values promoted with the thematic threads – no relation is observed to the veneration of war time heroes, no contribution to animal welfare, dubious merits from science and music and loads to crime.

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Conclusions We set out to seek answers to four questions: 1. Firstly, how much material about Bulgaria finds a place on the pages of the medium. The analysis so far established that the publications about Bulgaria on the BBC website are fewer than those about other countries. As seen from the exploded pie-charts, the coverage of Bulgaria is often one-sided, including fewer topics and less linkage to values of general appreciation. 2. Secondly, what topics are selected for the coverage The abundance of negative stories has been proven with our analysis: criticism from the EU and crime dominate the coverage. Compared to the other countries, Bulgaria is the country where the search of positive counterbalances led to low aesthetic criteria and dubious research findings. More significantly, the stories about Bulgaria are not grounded in the universal values of freedom, equality and welfare. Their reference is to a communist past, which is difficult to shake off and an inability to follow EU recommendations for fair democratic practices in the country. A primary distinction among the types of topics BBC selects to cover from Bulgaria is that social stories are avoided. One reason for this is that Bulgaria is of little interest outside international linkages. It never happens that Bulgaria is evoked as a source of reference for positive practices, or even for comparisons with other countries. The only type of comparison is using it as a benchmark for poverty. 3. Thirdly, each publication is called into existence by an event, public statement or journalistic investigation. Unlike the other countries in this study, Bulgaria has attracted undercover investigations from the BBC. The medium-induced coverage – a category evolved with this research – amounts to eliciting a negative expectation of the reality in Bulgaria. With a degree of uncertainty, we came to claim that the coverage of Bulgaria is evoked by statements rather than by actual events because the country is not followed closely by the reporters. 4. In the fourth place, an account of what has been published as news in other media, but skipped by those under investigation gives an idea about media orientations or bias. With a view of the tendency to avoid social stories, we explored what stories were covered by other media. Positive stories were encountered in Reuter’s coverage of Bulgaria which did not find a place on the BBC website. This leads us to conclude the image the BBC creates for Bulgaria

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is less positive it could be, had the information from the Reuters been followed through. It looks as if the medium seeks out negative information about Bulgaria and treads on safe ground finding it in crime stories while turning its back to stories about social development. The thematic threads established with the coverage reveal scanty information about Bulgarian culture, science and society. In fact, information about these aspects of life in Bulgaria is accidental and happens to be of low quality. In light of the New World Order debate and its reflections in the world of the twenty-first century, we can say that the image created for Bulgaria is deprived of positivity or stimulus for development. While nobody should strive to restrict the way the elite media choose to represent a country, the elite media’s attention needs to be drawn to the fact that constant reminders of the negative aspects of life in Eastern Europe are seen as creating a bad image rather than serving a social function to remind society of facts that deserve remembering. Desistance from looking at social aspects of life, inability to find consonance with local value systems results in a negative “othering”, in rising above a negligent inferior, in condemning the region to a position of a supplicant to be liked and reassured.

Issues of Methodology Coding categories that need to be explored are: the amount of rubrics covered by the medium, the degree of involvement, the providing occasions for the stories. A good coding schedule which elicits the moral values underpinning the coverage is the one of thematic threads.

CHAPTER THREE CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Fairclough (2009) defines discourse as a semiotic process which reflects society and creates meaning. In this process language stands in a dialectic relation with social structures. More often than not CDA analyses the linguistic aspect of discourses using Systemic Functional Grammar, where “experience is the reality we construe for ourselves by means of language” (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999:1). The authors maintain that language seen as meaning and not as knowledge shapes human experience as a semantic system “since language plays the central role not only in storing and exchanging experience but also in construing it.”

Systemic Functional Grammar Halliday’s theoretical model includes three metafunctions of language: the ideational, the textual and the interpersonal (ibid:8ff). The comparison with Chinese elicits a fourth function – the experiential (ibid.:315), subsumed under the ideational metafunction. The ideational metafunction analyses the clause as construing experience by categorising the type of predication and the participants involved in the process. The interpersonal metafunction enacts the relationship between the speaker and the addressee, as seen with the modalities characterising the situation. Through the textual function the clause is represented as the information contained within as a message – highlighting something as new or old information. Halliday presents the ideational function of language as structuring experience into three categories: sequences, figures and elements. While elements are simple components naming processes, participants, circumstances or relators, figures present configurations of those. They cluster around a specific type of verbal activity: material, speaking or sensing – and the participants associated with it. Sequences, for their part, present links among figures, where the development of the action is presented as expansion, projection or equal/unequal relation. Grammatically, elements

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are realised in lexis as phrases or words, figures are clauses or sentences while sequences are higher-order relations among clauses or sentences. A significant issue, however, seems to have escaped the notice of discourse analysts. Halliday and Matthiessen (ibid.: 206) classify qualities into three varieties: Binary (dead/alive) Scalar (happy/sad) Taxonomic (wooden, plastic, stone etc.) The latter are the most complex type, inasmuch as they bring external features into the process of classification. In their relation to reality, however, they are closely bound to facts – either a plank is made of wood or plastic. The binary attributes should be mutually exclusive and do not allow augmenting – *a little bit dead. Scalar attributes, for their part, allow for a great deal of opacity. In line with lexical choices, we can say that the qualification not at all happy attempts to characterise in relation to the quality happy. In fact, the person can be attributed the quality sad, were it not for the speaker’s intent to discuss happiness, not sadness. Furthermore, scalar attributes have the potential to act as a smoke screen when mixing positive qualities with negative adverbials. Thus swift reply would qualify the action positively. However, an adverb, such as overly would make the qualification negative. Thus, what appears a positive attribute can turn negative by adding the respective adverb modifying the adjective. Unlike binary attributes, however, the speaker’s intent cannot be qualified in relation to the adjective – swift, in our example. It would appear that qualifications combining scalar adjectives with adverbs of adverse meaning create opacity, lack of clarity and are therefore indicative of vague language: overly swift, overly confident, excessively self-reliant etc. Such language usages have not been explored, but the potential exists of them being part of the political dimension of being indirect. Processes can be presented as 6 types: material action or event, behavioural, mental perception, affection or cognition, verbal actions, relational processes of attribution or identification and existential process types. Each one has its typical participants performing functions determined by the verbal type. Thus, selecting from Halliday’s original examples, one may want to represent an action with e verb of material action: Birds are flying in the sky.

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In this case we are predicting a material action of the subject birds and specifying the circumstance of the action – the sky. Alternatively, we may want to represent the same as an existential process: There are birds flying in the sky. An existent entity – birds, is represented with its quality – flying in the circumstance – in the sky. Yet more options exist. We may decide to present the birds flying in the sky as the verbiage following a verb of speaking and a sayer: The priest told me birds were flying in the sky. We may choose to introduce this with a verb of perception, affection or cognition: The man saw birds flying in the sky. Elderly women love it when birds fly in the sky Students know that birds fly in the sky. In a different situation we may want to apply a process of attribution or identification: Birds are creatures flying in the sky. These are the birds which fly in the sky. Selecting a process type with the respective participants depends on the choice of the speaker and conversely – seeing the way a speaker has chosen to represent a life event, we can help analyse their intentions. Maybe we can go a step further – we may dive under the surface and discover which representation of a situation a speaker favours, which one fulfils his/her communicative intention, which one represents his/her idea of the state of affairs in the world. Transitivity is “the part of the grammar that constitutes a theory of how one happening may be related to another” (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999). Thus verbs which take objects (transitive) are contrasted with those that do not (intransitive), which, in turn, are semantically reinterpreted as process types: material, mental, verbal, relational, and ergative systems. Depending on the nature of the verbal process, the participants in those processes can be ACTOR, GOAL, SENSER, SAYER, CARRIER and

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VALUE on the part of the Subject. When presented as objects, affected participants can be OBJECT, FORCE, PATIENT, RESULT or BENECICIARY (Eggins 1994:228). Table 3.1 exemplifies these relations with illustration from corpora for this study: ACTOR Bulgaria and Romania SENSER Bulgarians and Romanians

MATERIAL PROCESS Joined

GOAL

CIRCUMSTANCE

the EU

in 2007

MENTAL PROCESS See

PHENOMENON the government's programme as a fantastic opportunity to cash in on the plentiful supply of work

VERBAGE

SAYER

‘The amount I earn here on the farm in a week would take me four weeks to earn in Bulgaria,’

she (Marina from BulgariaE.T.)

BAHAVER

PHENOMENON

She

BEHAVIOURAL PROCESS Reflects

EXISTENTIAL There are TOKEN Bulgarian and Romanians

VERBAL ACTION Says

on how lucky she feels to be working in the UK EXISTENT 65, 000 Bulgarians and Romanians

RELATIONAL PROCESS Are

VALUE One worker who has been granted a work permit

VALUE

PHENOMENON

Free

to enter the UK

RELATIONAL PROCESS Is

TOKEN Marina Georgieva from Bulgaria

Table 3.1. Types of verbal action. These relations can be modified with negation. Various studies employ this type of analysis to show what media make of events and characters (e.g. Soa 2013, Behnam and Zenouz 2008 etc.).

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The ideational metafunction is the most basic linguistic layer. At a higher level, the clause can be viewed as a message with its thematic organisation. The first position in the clause in English is designated to the old information – the theme. This is the point of departure for the message and presents knowledge familiar to both speaker and recipient. The latter part of the clause presents the information imparted as new by the speaker. Thus, while containing the same components, the two presentations below have different thematic structure (Halliday 1985:39): A halfpenny is the smallest English coin The smallest English coin is a halfpenny While the former is glossed: “I shall tell you about a halfpenny”, thus projecting the intended point of departure for the speaker, the latter should be about the smallest English coin. Postponing the subject has the effect of placing it in focus as part of the new information presented with the sentence: Once I was a real turtle. What the duke gave to my aunt was that teapot. Typical constructions exist in the English language which function as markers for the theme, such as As for, What X did was.... However, Halliday identifies three types of thematic components. Ideational thematic components are typically subjects, adjuncts or complements. With respect to the interpersonal function of language, thematic functions are performed by modal adjuncts, such as probably, broadly speaking, understandably etc.; by the auxiliary verb dislocated for the interrogative form; by vocatives. The textual function also produces thematic parts. One group of thematic components called continuative are interjections, such as well, oh, yes etc. The components which link clauses, such as and, because, even if, are called structural themes. The third group are conjunctions such as in other words, under the circumstances, nevertheless etc. Thus, in complex sentences, the focus can only be determined after sequential analysis, because several components project thematic function directing to different rhemes and the information structure lies in the balance. Worth mentioning is the status of reported speech where the reporting clause is thematic, highlighting the significance of the actual quotation. Halliday also discusses the use of metaphor as relating life events or things to the language describing them. Language, in his opinion, is a metaphor for life. However, he distinguishes between grammatical and

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lexical metaphors. Lexical metaphor applies to elements, where reality can be presented as a metaphoric expression. Grammatical metaphor occurs within figures and sequences. Halliday’s involvement with the innate relationship between language and society (1978) is instrumental for CDA through his conception of grammar as systemic - seeing language as choices made among a number of paradigmatic options. Deducing why some choices were made and others – discarded helps construct a picture of the mental set-up of those who produced the texts.

Nominalisations, passivisations and other devices Discourse analysts find particularly appealing the notion that elements such as circumstances “are less closely associated with the process and are not inherent in it” (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999:54). This gives them assurance that if a participant is presented as a circumstance rather than as a participant, his/her role in the event is degraded. Likewise, Tesniere (1959) juxtaposes actant and circonstant, where the former is a genuine participant in the verbal action and hence - a “significant” component of the situation, while the latter is less important, a mere “fringe”. Moreover, when discussing metaphor, Halliday notes parallel structures, such as: (recipient) give milk to the cat cf. give the cat milk Both represent a similar situation but in the first wording the cat is a fringe element of the figure – of little significance and loosely attached to the process, whereas in the second clause the cat is an active participant in the process. Many analysts (e.g. Pietikäinen 2003) employ this distinction in their analyses. They claim that characters featuring as circumstances rather than as participants do so because the author meant to degrade their participation in the action. Furthermore, Halliday reveals that presenting a thing (e.g. make an incision) rather than a process (cut) is a more abstract representation concealing the actual nature of the activity (1985:262-4). Loss of information has been observed concerning the agentivity for the actions, therefore claiming that the experience was deliberately presented without the doer of the action: Rapid bonding resulted/ as a result, the substances rapidly bonded. This has been known as the process of nominalisation for discourse analysts (van Dijk 2008a, Leeuwen 2012, Fowler 1991) and they have actively encouraged reading nominalised forms as efforts to conceal an actual process. Nominalisation is recognised as a transformation where “predicates are realised syntactically as nouns” (Fowler 1991).

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Nominalisation is a radical syntactic transformation of a clause, which has extensive structural consequences, and offers substantial ideological opportunities…. Deleted in the nominal form are the participants (who did what to whom?), any indication of time – because there is no verb to be tensed – and any indication of modality – the writer’s views as the truth or the desirability of the proposition.

In a pioneering work in the ideology of language, Hodge and Kress (1993:26) point to devices which give an ideological perspective to media texts. This approach to discourse becomes very popular among researchers. Three specific devices are presented: passives, nominalisations and negative incorporations. The passive transformation is said to have the following effects: • • • • •

it inverts the order of actor and affected – effect: the theme changes from actor to affected; the actor is no longer directly attached to the verb – effect: the link between actor and process is weakened; the verb be is introduced and the main verb is changed from a process to a finished result – effect: the process is presented as a state, not action; the actor may be deleted – effect: the cause of the action is hidden the structure is not transactive, but attributive – effect: the sentence functions to classify, not to show action

The nominalisation transformation, e.g. Picketing will stop deliveries, performs the following functions: • • • • • •

it deletes participants from the model – effect: the interest is directed from the participants to the process; a new noun is formed – effect: process is substituted for state, activity for object, specific for general, concrete for abstract; nominalisations are not marked for tense or modality – effect: speakers avoid indicating when or how likely an activity is; complex relations are collapsed into simple entities – effect: to hide the complexity of an actual situation; the new nominals acquire their own existence – effect: this further increase the opacity of nominals. Also simple causes are substituted for complex ones; the new nominals may become stable entities and even enter dictionaries – effect: change in the perceptual and cognitive inventory of the language.

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Negative incorporations – e.g. Miners ban overtime – can perform the following functions: • •

the negative particle is part of the word – effect: the word is perceived as a single unit, the negation is hidden (compare: Miners do not allow overtime) the word can be part of passive–active transformations – effect: refraining from action is seen in a positive light.

Later in time Van Leeuwen (2012) lists linguistic features which are indicative of suppression or backgrounding of social actors. They include passive structures, nominalisations and various other features used to hide the agency of an action. Tenorio (2011:184) lists six strategies for identifying ideological positioning: nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivisation, intensification and mitigation. Many of these observations have been challenged in the course of actual analysis. Still, they serve as a starting point for many researches.

Discourse Analytical Questions Fairclough (in Bloor and Bloor 1995:235) formulates questions which help analyse the linguistic aspect of language that has political functions: 1. What experiential values do grammatical features have? What types of process and participant dominate? Is agency unclear? Are processes what they seem? Are nominalisations used? Are sentences active or passive? Are sentences negative or positive? 2. What relational values do grammatical features have? What modes (declarative, interrogative, imperative) are used? Are there important features of relational modality? Are the pronouns we and you used, and if so, how? 3. What expressive values do grammatical features have? Are there important features of expressive modality? 4. How are simple sentences linked together? What logical connectors are used? Are complex sentences characterised by co-ordination or subordination? What means are used for referring inside and outside the text?

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Lexical Devices Further aspects of language explored by CDA have been overlexicalisation and terms of reference. Lexis is a major component of the ideational structure of language. The vocabulary amounts to a map of objects, concepts, processes and relations among them, specific for social strata, cultures or professional groups. Fowler (1991) was the first to explore a feature which he called naming: Different styles of naming are conventionally associated with different social values in English, and in a systemic way; this is a highly charged sociolinguistic indicator, like the options between the second-person pronouns tu and vous in French, du and Sie in German.

He exemplifies the issue with calling Margaret Thatcher Maggy or Mrs. Thatcher. There is no absolute value attributed to either: they show close familiarity or derogation depending on the concrete context of use. That is why linguistic features are not steadfast indicators by themselves; rather, having established such features, the researcher can begin their analysis in the concrete parameters of the context. Culture specifics should also be born in mind while interpreting the intent behind a choice of a term of reference. For example, shortened first names project foreign influence in Bulgarian, and most people would be embarrassed to have their shortened name used outside the close family and friend circle. The phrase ‘terms of reference’ is later substituted for ‘naming’ to avoid association with insults by giving people bad names. In effect, terms of reference perform a wider function than this, which explains its broad acceptance among the CDA community. Fowler (1991:85) defines over-lexicalisation as an “excess of quasisynonymous terms for entities and ideas that are a particular preoccupation or problem in the culture’s discourse.” As an example he gives various terms – often pejoratively used - of women or young people. Having established that a text is saturated with near-synonyms, we can diagnose that there is a preoccupation with the issue in the article. Fowler also mentions a process when a new term is introduced as signifying a purportedly new concept in social life. This is known as re-lexicalisation. As an example, he quotes the term ‘social ownership’ offered of the Labour Party to substitute the overexploited and derogated term nationalisation.

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Pragmatic Devices Going up the ladder of structural units of analysis – from lexis and grammar to texts and discourse, van Dijk’s (2003a) suggests that the tactics of creating an image include two sets of strategies: for positive selfpresentation and negative other-presentation. The array of techniques for achieving this includes the following components: • Overall interaction strategies • Macro speech acts • Semantic macro-structures – topic selection • Local speech acts: accusations, statements, queries etc. • Local meanings Give many/few details Be general/specific Be vague/precise Be explicit/implicit • Lexicon: Select positive words for us Negative words for them • Local syntax Active v/s passive sentences – to de-emphasise responsibility Nominalisations – to de-emphasise agency • Rhetorical figures Hyperboles Euphemisms Metonyms Metaphors • Sounds and visuals Van Dijk (2008:233) exemplifies the overall interaction strategies with the ideological polarisation in Tony Blair’s speech, where the politician structures the discourse space into Us –democracies and Them – dictatorships. Formally, social actor representation can be effected through personal pronouns and other deictic devices. In his ‘sociosemantic inventory of how social actors can be represented’, van Leeuwen (1996:32) points out that social actors do not necessarily map onto grammatical actors; for instance, impersonalised actors can be non-human entities that are still represented as engaged in particular actions, be it as active actors or as passive goals.

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A big part of CDA deals with the concept of macro-structures. It proceeds from the concept of coherence defined as “a semantic property of discourses, based on the interpretation of each individual sentence relative to the interpretation of other sentences” (van Dijk 1977:93). Thus, apart from providing a common world of existence, the coherence of a text also indicates the missing links that make the text ‘hang together’. Macrostructures are sequenced due to the semantic relations that obtain among them. Thus establishing the micro-structure in a complex structure and the relations among the component parts presents a fair analysis of a text’s coherence. Concrete speech acts: accusations, statements, queries etc. Unlike the macro speech acts, which may not contain phrases performing the respective function, this category seeks out concrete formulations. Bach and Harnish (1979) develop the following classification of speech acts, incorporating Austin's taxonomy and Grice's theory of conversation Constatives: affirming, alleging, announcing, answering, attributing, claiming, classifying, concurring, confirming, conjecturing, denying, disagreeing, disclosing, disputing, identifying, informing, insisting, predicting, ranking, reporting, stating, stipulating Directives: advising, admonishing, asking, begging, dismissing, excusing, forbidding, instructing, ordering, permitting, requesting, requiring, suggesting, urging, warning Commissives: agreeing, guaranteeing, inviting, offering, promising, swearing, volunteering Acknowledgments: apologising, condoling, congratulating, greeting, thanking, accepting (acknowledging an acknowledgment)

Genre Specifics The structure of the newspaper article has been described as an inverted pyramid (Bell 1991:167ff), where the greatest amount of information is concentrated at the top and each paragraph adds further details considered more ‘perishable’ and capable of being disposed of, should space require curtailing the text. The major journalistic questions: who, what, to whom, when, where and how should be answered in the

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abstract, which forms the basis of the informational pyramid. Recent professional research has added several modifications, however, the fact of having the major details at the outset of the article remains. Van Dijk (1977:78) develops this topic further in connection with his terms macro- and micro- structure. He writes: “... the highest or most important topic is expressed in the headline, the top of the complete macrostructure of the text is formulated in the lead, and the initial sentences or paragraphs of the text express a still lower level of macrostructure... A news text is a top-bottom mapping of the underlying semantic structure.” He also voices the opinion that selecting what appears in the headline is a matter of subjective choice of the journalist and editor. In his analysis, van Dijk demonstrates that the analysed article is about more than one topic, but only one is chosen for the headline and this has been a deliberate choice. Discourse analysis also seeks impact in the use of typographic conventions, such as inverted commas. Conboy (2007:64) classifies the device as a form of modality which privileges one particular reading of a story and refusing to be drawn into any definitive comment. He also claims that the quotation marks are a way of making an accusation which one does not need to substantiate (2007:90).

Corpus All the materials about one topic concerning Bulgaria on the BBC website are collected for this study. The in-depth analysis of the linguistic features described above - from transitivity and lexis to macro-structures will be indicative of the representations made of Bulgaria by the BBC. The question I will try to answer is: is there anything in these representations that creates negative attitudes to Bulgaria? The articles for this corpus were selected because of their topic Bulgaria’s bid to join the Schengen zone. The search with key words Bulgaria AND Schengen on the BBC website over the period January 1st 2008 to December 31st 20011 returns 10 articles. Six merely mention the name of the country in enumerations, which is why they are not subjected to analysis. The remaining four are: 18 July 2008 “EU plans to block aid to Bulgaria” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7512955.stm 17 April 2009 ‘EU free movement of labour map’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3513889.stm

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21 December 2010 “Romania and Bulgaria blocked from joining Schengen zone” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12055299 9 June 2011 “Schengen zone: Delay for Bulgaria and Romania to join” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13709768 The articles quite exhaust what the BBC had to say on the issue of Bulgaria becoming a member of the Schengen zone over a period of three years. The attention given to the issue is, indeed, very little and the quantity would suggest that the BBC attaches little significance to it at all.

Article 1. The first article leads with a verb of mental action concerning Bulgaria: The European Commission IS PLANNING to block almost $1bn in funds for Bulgaria as a penalty for failing to tackle corruption and organised crime. We understand that the event reported on the website is not an action but plans. Of all the content of the EC document, the BBC chooses to highlight what actually constitutes a threat to Bulgaria: to lose millions’ worth of aid and to miss the opportunity to join the Schengen visa-free area – a much coveted horizon since Bulgaria’s accession to the EU. To boost the gravity of the situation, the text attaches a qualification to the document that prompted the article: The commission's nine-page report, due to be published next week, is possibly THE MOST SCATHING EVER WRITTEN BY THE EU EXECUTIVE ABOUT A MEMBER STATE. Towards the end of the article, however, relegated to a place for less important details in a newspaper article, there is a hedge about the pungency of the document. Its modality is of weak uncertainty: Diplomats say the strong language of the draft report MAY BE WATERED DOWN by Wednesday, when the 27 European Commissioners, including those from Bulgaria and Romania, are set to adopt it. Further, Bulgaria is said to have experienced the measure the article threatens with, losing EU funds:

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The EU HAS ALREADY FROZEN hundreds of millions' worth of aid destined for Bulgaria's roads and agriculture. Who is the warning trying to scare then? This becomes obvious through a running comparison with Romania: In a separate report, ROMANIA IS ALSO EXPECTED TO FACE STRONG CRITICISM, especially over the parliament's delay of corruption inquiries involving a former prime minister and other top officials, but THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION WILL STOP SHORT OF SANCTIONS. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that the author of the article is a Romanian national: Oana Lungescu, BBC correspondent for the Balkans at the time. In a subheading to one of the parts of the text she quotes an unnamed EU official to utter a devastating comparison between the two countries: One EU official said that “Romania was marking time, WHILE BULGARIA HAD GONE BACKWARDS”. The formal reason for bundling together the two countries is their common date of accession to the EU and the common approach adopted to both: Bulgaria and its neighbour Romania are subject to special monitoring because THEY DID NOT FULLY COMPLY WITH EU STANDARDS WHEN THEY JOINED THE BLOC. However, the article appears to praise Romania for being considered the better of the two due to the lack of threatened sanctions in the report about it. The gravity of the warning is reinforced through over-lexicalisation: several lexical phrases quoting sums of money which can be lost to Bulgaria. They are scrupulously named throughout the article and their meaning severely contrasts with the claim that Bulgaria is the poorest country in the EU: The European Commission is planning to block almost $1bn in funds for Bulgaria as a penalty for failing to tackle corruption and organised crime.

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Now it is planning to withdraw the right of two agencies to handle EU funds worth almost $1bn (610 million euros) Almost $400m (250 million euros) could be lost unless things improve by November. Bulgaria, the EU's poorest country, stands to receive $17bn in EU funds until 2011, and this is a serious warning that future funding is in jeopardy. The sum total does not add up – it is not clear where the announced amounts come from, however, large sums of money are flaunted as pending for a big loss for Bulgaria and the effect is fright of the scale of the threats. But what did Bulgaria do to deserve such severe sanctions? Large chunks of the EU document are quoted between inverted commas, whereby the BBC distances itself from both content and formulation – accusations that do not need to be substantiated (Conboy 2007). The formulations are vague for several reasons. The conjoined predicative verbs are of mental, rather than material action: It concludes that Bulgaria “HAS TO MAKE THE COMMITMENT to cleanse its administration and ENSURE that the generous support it receives from the EU actually reaches its citizens ..... „. The nominalisation COMMITMENT presents an oblique statement; the medium avoids naming a definitive action. The focus is on engaging with something through pre-posing the empty verb MAKE. The agent of the obligation is very broad – Bulgaria, not a ministry, or an official. The subject is not required to DO something, but to BE engaged – which is a state, not an action. The action comes with the complement realised by a metaphor - CLEANSE THE ADMINISTRATION. Such a wording abdicates from an actual formulation of a concrete action that needs to be taken. It only stipulates that something is not ‘clean’ in the administration. Thus the action required of Bulgaria is presented with a metaphor which any interpreter can fill with different meanings. The second part of the complex predicate – ENSURE – is another verb of mental, not material action. It takes as its complement a whole clause underlining the generosity of the EU support. The directive continues with a negatively presented metaphor: .... and is not SIPHONED OFF by corrupt officials, operating together with organised crime”

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The ideational metaphor SIPHON OFF summarises the longer claim: illegally redirect money for personal enrichment from public funds. There is a compact verb for the same proposition: embezzle, but it would deprive the wording of its picturesque value and, in effect, voice a legal qualification, inasmuch as embezzlement constitutes a crime. The negative formulation actually curtails the process of making a claim that such activities are taking place, refuses to prove the claim by pointing out how it is being done and suggesting ways to stop such criminal action. And this precisely is the danger of such contracted metaphoric messages – that they focus on a visualisation of the process but not on the mechanisms of their functioning that might direct to eradicating the evil. The passive form is employed to highlight the agency – the active re-write would have a simple Thematic Subject: Corrupt officials siphon off funds... Instead, introducing the agent with the BY structure places it in the rheme, at the end of the statement, thus emphasising its importance. Furthermore, it allows expanding the formulation with a non-finite clause: ‘operating together with organised crime’. The structure of the article features the conclusion of the report as the fact of utmost significance, because it comes at the beginning where the most important facts tend to be placed in this genre – in the base of the inverted pyramid (Bell:1991). It is preceded only by BBC’s interpretation of the news item – how much money Bulgaria stands to lose. Then the EC’s report is quoted for the recommended course of action. This, however, has not been named with a specific material process but through the metaphoric phrases discussed above. The rest of the article is dedicated to a description of the actual situation in Bulgaria. It is introduced with the subheading LACK OF WILL. The semantic structure is negative through the meaning of LACK. Highlighting negativity in an affirmative sentence makes the critique oblique rather than direct, head-on. The noun WILL, for its part, requires complementation – will for what? The complement comes in a different paragraph: .... there is little political will elsewhere to clean up things The general substitute THINGS does not point to a sphere that needs to be cleaned up. Moreover, once again a metaphor is used which gives a visualisation but does not name a material action that should be dealt with.

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This is another vague accusation without a specific claim or a proposal for concrete remedial action. The existential construction is marked with a tone of positive-ness – it is not negative: There is no will. The negativity comes from the quantification – LITTLE. The sense of vagueness is reinforced via the locative circumstance ELSEWHERE, which picks up no particular sphere of reference either. From the co-text of the phrase we can deduce that the area that needs to be cleaned up is to do with European funds: EU officials welcome recent changes, including the appointment of a respected diplomat, Meglena Plugchieva, as a deputy prime minister in CHARGE OF OVERSEEING EU FUNDS. What begins as praise, however, is continued with an adversative clause: BUT the report suggests there is little political will elsewhere to clean up things. The discourse continues to be positively structured, but with an increasing degree of ambiguity. For the purposes of the analysis, the clauses will be paraphrased to try and decipher what problems are identified in Bulgaria in Table 3.2: “Despite the Commission's repeated requests for improvement of the management and control systems, within reasonable deadlines, the Bulgarian authorities have not fully explained or clarified the situation surrounding the irregularities and have not taken all necessary steps to correct them,” it says. The Commission requested repeatedly improvement of ?the management and control systems? The management and control systems ?of the EU funds? need improvement.

The improvements should be done within reasonable deadlines

There is a situation? surrounding irregularities ? in management and control systems?

The Bulgarian authorities have not explained ?or clarified? this situation. They have not taken steps to correct the irregularities.

Table 3.2. Decomposed sentences expanding the modification

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The lack of proper modification makes it difficult to understand whether the management and control systems for the EU funds are problematic, or some other management and control systems – of the country, economy or something else. The loose conjoining of the temporal clause “within reasonable deadlines”, for its part, poses the question whether the functioning of the systems raises concern or the reaction of the Bulgarian government which is taking too long to come. If we presume that irregularities in management and control systems are envisaged, the general substitute SITUATION obscures which of the factors surrounding the irregularities worry the inspectors. The compound predicate “explained or clarified” layers the semantics of performing a verbal act rather than taking action in a specified direction. Thus, it appears as if the report raises worries that the Bulgarian authorities should explain some situation sooner, and this situation might somehow relate to management and control systems, which is another nebulous claim lacking the substance of material action and congruently formulated accusations. The problem presented with this structure – with all the ambiguities – appears to be improvement of some management and control systems in Bulgaria. The next sentence continues the quotation from the draft report with an elaboration of the problem. The problem itself is reworded: … these problems of general weakness in administrative and judicial capacity While ADMINISTRATIVE is a synonym of MANAGEMENT – maybe not just concerning the euro-funds, JUDICIAL is a great deal more specialised than CONTROL, compared to the earlier formulation of the problem. What is more, the head of the noun phrase directs attention to a different problem – capacity. While at first clarifications of some situation seemed to be required of the Bulgarian government, now it appears that the administrative systems are not functioning properly, and what is more - the capacities of the administrators are the problem. At this stage of confusion in naming the problem, CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME are introduced in the article: The draft report goes on to say, “high level corruption and organised crime EXACERBATES these problems of general weakness in administrative and judicial capacity... Urgent action is needed because deadlines for contracting some of the funds are approaching after which the funds will be lost to Bulgaria”.

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The semantics of the verb EXACERBATE suggests expansion on a previous situation. While we assumed that the situation is the inefficiency of the management and control - possibly, the judicial systems, here the problems are re-worded differently: that the agencies which administer EU funds are staffed with incompetent workers, while HIGH LEVEL CORRUPTION can imply that high-ranking officials are bribed to turn a blind eye to their incompetence. ORGANISED CRIME is more difficult to interpret in relation to the incompetence of administrators. But these semantic inconsistencies should be blamed on the EU report: EU officials formulated the problems with reference to graphic descriptions of the situation rather than through technical details; instead of naming the problems with unambiguous terms that would focus on the nature of the inconsistencies, they used ambiguous phrases with shifting reference; instead of pinpointing problems, they expounded on threats of financial losses. The BBC, however, chose to report the document without expressing an attitude to its cogency. The BBC article continues with an effort at a more factual description of the situation in Bulgaria that has evoked such strong EU criticism. This part is not a quote from the EU report and is compiled by the journalist. The subheading is MAFIA KILLINGS. However, the first paragraph is about fraud in projects to upgrade border controls. The link between the two is very problematic. Moreover, it is not clear whether this is a revelation of the EU report quoted in the article, because the following sentence gives as its source a different EU report leaked in the Bulgarian press. It is about fraud in the use of agricultural funds, not border control. The text then refers to something as “the document”, without making it clear which the rightful antecedent is. This document is about punishing corruption – without a reference to mafia killings again. Its authorship is mixed – firstly the BBC author glosses her interpretation of “the document”, then she quotes the formulation verbatim: The document alleges there is a political umbrella protecting corruption, saying there are “powerful forces in the Bulgarian government and/or other state institutions” who are not interested in punishing the corruption. The author’s gloss is a metaphor – POLITICAL UMBRELLA PROTECTING CORRUPTION; the original document is quoted to highlight the source of the problem - “powerful forces in the Bulgarian government and/or other state institutions”. Thus, the accusation that Bulgarian governmental organisations protect corruption has the EU

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reporters as its agent. The accusation is once again negatively formulated through a verb of mental activity: “are not interested in”. This was established as a peculiarity of the diplomatic language of the EU report quoted directly with the article. Obviously, the BBC journalist adopted the same manner of expression. However, the BBC takes a step back from the qualification reporting the document with the distancing verb ALLEGE. Then the accused person – the Bulgarian Prime Minister - is given the floor and he dismisses “the allegations”. The paragraph, however, develops with an adversative: But earlier this year, the powerful interior minister WAS FORCED to step down after revelations he had secretly met two alleged crime bosses and some of his officials were leaking confidential information to mafia suspects. The main verb features material action applied to a guilty minister – WAS FORCED. The rhematic part of the sentence highlights the nature of the revelations that forced him to step down – links with criminal elements. Thus the article – through a link to an EU document that is sporadically broken to garner more accusations – highlights the theme of the incompetent and corrupt government, except for a “respected diplomat” recently appointed in charge of EU funds. However, the subheading “Mafia killings” still remains unsupported with an actual report of murder as the next paragraph informs that the general election scheduled for the following year will add to the troubles of the Socialist government. The term of reference signals the BBC estimate of its situation: “beleaguered government”. The accusations of a lack of administrative capacity, high-level corruption, belated reactions to EU communications, “political umbrellas” to crime form a line of reference to the Bulgarian government which overlexicalises the displeasure of the EU officials – willingly voiced by the BBC. Outside the quotations from EU documents, the reporter mentions a threat to the government by the Bulgarian opposition: The opposition is preparing to table a motion of no confidence the day after the document is adopted is in Brussels. Mafia killings occur in one paragraph only in the part of the article entitled with that phrase. They feature in a rhematic position, in an extended noun phrase:

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The European Commission will also raise concerns about the persistent failure to solve ANY OF THE 150 MAFIA KILLINGS RECORDED IN BULGARIA SINCE THE FALL OF COMMUNISM. The predicate is once again a mental action, this time – presented metaphorically and in a future tense: “will also raise concerns”. Nebulous is also the source of the claim – is this part of the report(s) under discussion in this article, is it the case that such a statement is to be included later, or will the concern be raised verbally or through a different document? At the same time, the nominalisation ‘persistent failure’ is one of the expressions which add up to overlexicalise the inefficiency of the Bulgarian government. In effect, the EU document accuses the Bulgarian government of incompetence but stops short of formulating it for diplomatic reasons, as EU institutions have no right to interfere with elected national governments. Then the article splits from its announced topic – Bulgaria – and switches to its Northern neighbour, Romania, featured with a sub-heading: In a separate report, Romania is also expected to face strong criticism, especially over the parliament's delay of corruption inquiries involving a former prime minister and other top officials, but the European Commission will stop short of sanctions. The concession clause – that Romania may be criticised but not yet punished – contains an understated piece of information. Obviously the journalist knows that criticism has been planned but no penalty, but she acknowledges neither her source, nor the essence of the threat. That is what reinforces the conclusion that the article uses the report about Bulgaria – a reality at least planned and drafted – to issue a warning to the BBC journalist’s native country – Romania. The article very much formulates this in its final sentence: Both countries will continue to be watched very closely and officials say the measures planned against Bulgaria SHOULD SERVE AS A WARNING TO OTHERS, BOTH INSIDE THE EU AND THOSE HOPING TO JOIN IT. This expands the number of recipients of the warning action beyond the journalist’s native country, thus making her motives less selfish. Further, the European tax payer who needs accountability for his taxes is called upon as a motivation for the accusations against Bulgaria:

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But the general feeling is that something must be done, and seen to be done, TO MAINTAIN THE CREDIBILITY OF THE EU WITH ITS TAXPAYERS. The subject of the verbal action is a very ubiquitous entity – the general feeling. The topical structure is a general substitute – SOMETHING – and the circumstance of the action is a nominalisation: “the credibility” with its agent – EU TAXPAYERS – rhematised at the end of the statement. In effect, the article issues threats to suspend funds for Bulgaria because of the inefficiency of the Government, based on a drafted EU report which is expected to be published after softening the harsh tone. The stance of the EU document is reinforced with facts quoted by the journalist as parts of other EU documents, or unsupported claims of facts, all – featuring the inefficiency of the Bulgarian government. Romania is introduced as a contrast – accepted in the EU with the same problems as Bulgaria, but not planned for sanctions yet. With a view of this analysis, the conclusion that the BBC provided their Romanian-born journalist with a medium to gloat over Bulgaria’s ill fortunes in the EU is very feasible. Linguistic devices for defaming established with this article: Overlexicalisation – repetition of huge sums of money Bulgaria stands to lose if she does not heed EU warnings. Using verbs of mental action and states rather than verbs of real action for the activities required of Bulgaria – make a commitment, ensure. Use of metaphor when describing the actual flaws in the country: siphon off funds, political umbrella against crime etc., or recommended remedial action: cleanse the administration. Lack of logical links between a subtitle and article – MAFIA KILLINGS is the sub-title of a passage about misuse of funds for border control and agriculture and only one sentence mentions murders. The passive is used to highlight the doer of the action with a phrase postponed to the end of a sentence and suitable extended - SIPHONED OFF by corrupt officials, operating together with organised crime. The lack of necessary complementation confuses about the actual situation: lack of will – for what?; management of systems – which systems? etc. In the following text complements are added of different nature – systems of control, judicial systems or management of funds. This can be called shifty complementation.

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The use of the superlative to highlight the gravity of the situation – the most scathing report so far – is weakened with weak modality in a sentence hidden in the least salient place of the article – at the end – the strength of the document may be watered down. The unannounced comparative focus with the author’s country, oozing through expressions such as: In a separate report, Romania is also expected to face strong criticism, especially over the parliament's delay of corruption inquiries involving a former prime minister and other top officials, but the European Commission will stop short of sanctions

Article 2. The second article presents Bulgaria – this time indiscriminately bundled together with Romania – as firmly blocked from joining the Schengen zone. It is not signed by a specific journalist. The headline is a non-finite clause with a past participle as predicate – BLOCKED, which is an indication that the action is completed and the feature is a permanent characteristic of the object. The agent of the action is presented later - in the topic sentence: France and Germany. There the verb is of mental action – HAVE DECIDED. The complement reiterates the same strong verb – TO BLOCK, specifies the recipients – BULGARIA AND ROMANIA - and an extended goal – FROM JOINING EUROPE’S PASSPORT FREE TRAVEL ZONE. Romania and Bulgaria blocked from joining Schengen zone France and Germany have decided to block Bulgaria and Romania from joining Europe's passport-free travel zone. Then the article proceeds to quote officials. Interestingly, the quotations include single words that appear between inverted commas, not whole statements. Each sentence is a paragraph; no linking words indicate logical connections among the propositions. Firstly, the French and German interior ministers are quoted. The predicate attributes the adjective “premature” to letting the countries join in 2011. The French and German interior ministers said it was “PREMATURE” to let them join Schengen in March 2011.

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Obviously the qualification is attached to a decision to let the countries join. What is rhematised is the temporal horizon. The adjective MATURE presents a graded pair with its denial – IMMATURE. The suffix PRE- just postpones the process of maturity until a later date. In effect, a binary adjective is transformed into a gradable one to avoid making a definitive statement. Actually, the claim is that the countries should not join the agreement, but the statement shifts the focus from the material action to its timing. The statement clearly does not predicate of the countries, but of a decision; no negativity transpires – it is all about timing. The second sentence attempts to clarify what is expected of Romania and Bulgaria. It is formulated as a nominalised abstract phrase MAKE PROGRESS. They said Bulgaria and Romania needed to make “irreversible progress” in the fight against corruption and organised crime. One reason for the nominalisation PROGRESS may be the attribute IRREVERSIBLE. Such phrases, however, pose the question whether the claimants think that there is no progress, or that the progress is reversible while it should not be. The nominalisation is complemented with another metaphor – PROGRESS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME. Progress in such a combat is something very difficult to define – the semantics give no idea what constitutes movement forward. What is formulated as a requirement is once again a metaphor which is not filled with a concrete sense. Furthermore, CORRUPTION is another nominalisation which boggles the mind. The OED defines corruption as “(6. a.) perversion or destruction of integrity in the discharge of public duties by bribery or favour; the use or existence of corrupt practices, esp. in a state, public corporation, etc.” This action is left without an agent with the nominalisation. Furthermore, the verbal action is not explicitly clear – construal of what constitutes “destruction of integrity” can be quite subjective. Therefore, fighting such an ephemeral process, without a known agent or a clear outline requires a great deal of imagination. Even smaller is the semantic clarity of the noun phrase ORGANISED CRIME (For a detailed discussion of definitions see Lea 2007). The noun refers to a host of activities characterised with the adjective ILLEGAL, therefore undesirable. The attribute, conversely, refers to order and arrangement. Thinking of it as a participle, the verbal action refers to a highly desirable process – putting things in order, creating harmony. Thus, we are faced with an oxymoron – harmonised criminality. The agent of “organise” is un-named and the essence of the

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verbal action - unclear. Therefore, Bulgaria and Romania are called upon to enter a fight with forces which make people immoral and organise illegal activities – an all too predictable type of struggle with an all too unfathomable agent. However, the BBC have marked as quoted only “irreversible progress”, which means that they find the phrase “fight against corruption and organised crime” sufficiently transparent to identify with. Following is a sentence contrasting the reactions of the two countries: Romania CONDEMNED the decision, while Bulgaria PROMISED TO “DO ITS UTMOST” to remove doubts about its membership. Romania is agent to a very strong behavioural action – CONDEMN, Bulgaria engages in the verbal act of promising. The verbiage features an expression between inverted commas: DO ITS UTMOST. Concordance lines from the BNC (Davis 2004) show that this phrase occurs in the language of diplomacy. More often than not it is used as a commissive, because it collocates with the first person possessive pronoun OUR or MY. On this occasion, however, the expression does not contain a first person pronoun but the inanimate form ITS, showing that it is a noncommitted paraphrase. The semantics of UTMOST is empty, inasmuch as the word does not refer to any quality or object at all, but emphasises. The complementation continues in the same vein of vagueness. The material action REMOVE applies to the abstract noun DOUBTS, complemented with the nominalisation (about) MEMBERSHIP. Presenting the reactions of the two countries in one sentence reveals the fact that the author has sought a contrast – while Romania is indignant, Bulgaria is elusively compliant, employing the European parlance of vagueness. Further, the contrast implies the level of reaction: Romania reacts from its highest level (the President), while Bulgaria gets a spokes-person to voice the ambiguous position quoted. The next sentence takes an even further distance from the event: the German and French ministers are said to have expressed this opinion in a letter to the EU Home Affairs Commissioner, which, in turn, is reported by the Agency France Press, abbreviated as a familiar reference. Having reported the fact of blocking Bulgaria with the title, the article next announces the news that EU experts are to present a report on Bulgaria and Romania on which the EU countries are to base their decisions whether to let the candidates join the Schengen zone. In an adversative clause - with the linking word BUT – the provision is made that a unanimous decision is needed. No semantic contrasts can be found

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between the two parts of the sentence; therefore, the adversative can only be interpreted in the sense that admission is highly unlikely. Experts from EU states who visited Romania and Bulgaria are due to present a report in January that will be used by governments to make a decision on Romanian and Bulgarian membership of the zone, BUT it must be agreed by the Schengen members in unanimity. Compare: Experts from EU states who visited Romania and Bulgaria are due to present a report in January that will be used by governments to make a decision on Romanian and Bulgarian membership of the zone, AND it must be agreed by the Schengen members in unanimity. The subject of the clause is the pronoun replacing “decision” – IT – and the predicate is marked with the strong modality of obligation expressed by MUST. In effect, the force of the obligation applies strictly to the decision. The agency of the agreement is highlighted by transposing the doer of the action in a “by” phrase. However, the most rhematic position is occupied by the circumstance of manner IN UNANIMITY. Given the exceptional status of unanimous decisions, its position is another reminder how difficult admission will be for the two countries. As with most media articles, this presents information on the principle of the inverted pyramid – the greatest amount is concentrated in the abstract (Bell 1991, van Dijk 1988) with each paragraph adding details of lesser importance. Under the subheading “Grave consequences” four paragraphs expound on the words of the German minister, the Romanian reaction and the Bulgarian statement. The German position takes two paragraphs, which should be indicative of the significance attached to it by the BBC. The verbiage of the spokesman of the German Ministry of the Interior is presented without inverted commas: A spokesman for Germany's interior ministry said there had also been a lack of progress by Romania and Bulgaria in reforming their judiciary, Associated Press news agency reported. The noun PROGRESS is negated with the word LACK and highlighted with the existential construction THERE HAD BEEN. The agent of the non-existent progress is introduced with the “by” phrase for more emphasis, while the problematic sphere is placed in the right-most position

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– of the greatest importance. The adverb ALSO signals that a claim different from the one made with the second paragraph has been made – “fight against corruption and organised crime”. It concerns a more specific sphere – the judiciary. This time a material action is also predicated – REFORM THEIR JUDICIARY. If the accusations are to be graded in the order of their significance, placing the metaphorically nebulous formulation “fight against crime and organised corruption” before “reforming the judiciary” is odd. Problematic is also the reference of the personal pronoun THEIR. It is unlikely that Bulgaria and Romania have a common judiciary; even less likely is the fact that the situation in each country is the same, so as to be referred to with a common denomination. That is why packaging the countries together leaves the impression that details are ignored and only most general claims are made as an excuse to keep the countries outside the Schengen zone. The next paragraph explains the significance of the revelations. The lack of progress in the judiciary is reiterated with the qualification “deficit”. The modality is of possibility – “could have”. The attribute of the possession is a phrase in quotation marks: “grave consequences for the European Union’s security”. The spokesman said THOSE DEFICITS could have “grave consequences for the European Union's security” and raised concerns about an “overly swift” adhesion to the Schengen area. Quotation marks are used because the BBC repeats the words spoken by the German spokesman, but speculation that distancing from such vague qualifications is also in order. The phrase clearly indentifies which sphere of the EU this would affect – its security. The noun phrase “grave consequences”, however – also used as subheading for the second part of the text – is odd without the complement for several reasons. Firstly, because it is common knowledge that each deficit has its consequences and according to the pragmatics maxim of quantity (Grice 1975: 26–30), there is no need to verbalise it. Secondly, the answer to the question: “What kind of consequences?” needs to be factual, rather than purely qualitative, as is the adjective “grave”. Moreover, according to Halliday and Methiessen’s (1999), “grave” is not a taxonomic value, but scalar, presenting a scale of seriousness. Therefore, it cannot make a claim what the consequences might be but can only qualify them. Selecting this for subheading has the function of parodying a discourse that is empty of logical motivation. The co-odrinated predicate is no less absurd:

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raised concerns about an “overly swift” adhesion to the Schengen area The act of joining the area too soon is named with the nominalisation “adhesion” to allow for the pre-modification “overly swift”. SWIFT is an adjective of positive semantics, including also the meaning of lack of delay: “2. a. Coming on, happening, or performed without delay; prompt, speedy.” (Oxford English Dictionary). The negativity of the phrase proceeds from the intensifier “overly”, since the antonyms to swift are definitely negative: delayed, slow, sluggish. However, the statement does not make it clear whether “swift adhesion” would be acceptable, or “slow”, or “overly slow”. The discussion of the precise timing should be done in taxonomic adjectives and not in gradable terms of emotive value which leave the impression that something is wrong without explaining what. The article unfolds the level of detail quoting the reaction of the Romanian President verbatim, between inverted commas. The second paragraph of the article qualifies the act – a condemnation, while here the reader can see the actual words. The President speaks in the first person singular to emphasise the importance of his position. The predicate is a verb of mental action – BELIEVE, to highlight the statement as an opinion. The phenomenon qualifies the Franco-German letter as “an act of discrimination”. Romanian President Traian Basescu said: “I believe that the FrancoGerman letter sent to the European Commission is an act of discrimination against Romania.” The use of the noun DISCRIMINATION instead of the verb DISCRIMINATE directs attention to what the act constitutes and not to the performance. Formulating this as a legal offence makes the statement very powerful and befitting the authority of the speaker. The statement of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry, voiced through a low-ranking official – a spokeswoman - is also quoted literally and within quotation marks. Again the whole statement is given, while initially a single phrase is quoted at the beginning of the article. Bulgarian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Vessela Cherneva told AFP: “We are aware that the political situation in some EU member countries is complicated. For that reason, we will do our utmost to remove any doubts, including in the areas of the judicial system and society as a whole.”

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She uses the first person plural as her subject, as befits speaking for an organisation - or a country – in this case. Her predicate is also one of mental activity – ARE AWARE. However, the phenomenon is “the political situation in some EU member countries is complicated”. There is no connector to indicate a logical link to the question under discussion – the lacking progress in judicial reforms in Bulgaria and Romania; and the semantics hardly leads to such a link. The rest of the statement is prefaced with the explanatory connector – “for that reason”, which creates a fake logical structure of a cause – result conjecture. The semantics of the two parts are incompatible: the situation in western countries is complicated – Bulgaria will affirm its right of membership in the EU. Then follows the promise “to do our utmost to remove any doubts” – a statement quoted at the beginning of the article and repeated once again here, characterised as an emphatic diplomatic statement of little substance. The concluding sentence enumerates the members of the Schengen zone, where the UK is a non-member just like the excluded Bulgaria and Romania. “Bulgaria” features in subject positions for predicates expressing necessity or obligation - need or have to: They said Bulgaria and Romania needed to make “irreversible progress” in the fight against corruption and organised crime. The article quotes another news agency – France Press – and is not signed by an author. Additionally, an attitude of distancing from the subject matter can be seen throughout and it is not by chance that one of the emptiest qualifications in it is selected as sub-heading, placed between quotation marks – “grave consequences”. Such expressions feature as the position of the participants in the action, deliberately left without proper logical links or connectors. On this occasion, Bulgaria is presented as the recipient of a blocking action from two powerful members of the EU, who give obscure explanations of their actions; a ministry official promises to remove doubts about the Bulgarian membership in the EU – a promise even vaguer than the explanations of the German and French ministers while the Romanian President condemns the incident as discrimination. Thus an unappealing picture is given of the realities in the European Union, quite intact with the salient UK euro-scepticism. Linguistic devices for defaming established with this article: Use of metaphor when describing the actual flaws in the country.

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Conjunctions reveal developments as impossible: to make a decision on Romanian and Bulgarian membership of the zone, BUT/AND? it must be agreed by the Schengen members in unanimity. Use of gradable adjectives rather than of taxonomic ones – the decision to let Bulgaria join the Schengen zone will have consequences described as grave. It is not clear what they will be – compromising safety, losing assets. The qualification is grave, whatever that spells in actual terms; accession will be overly swift etc. The adjectives refer to time, not essence – premature. Vague reference - Bulgaria and Romania are to improve THEIR judiciary, as if they have a common judiciary, instead of two separate, clearly distinguishable from one another systems. Elusive complementation – when the commission says that Bulgaria has not made “irreversible progress”, the complementation does not clarify whether the problem is that there is no progress, or that the progress is reversible when it should not. Oblique language functions – the phrase DO MY UTMOST is a diplomatic promise to take action in a certain direction. Substituting MY for OUR or ITS does not really commit an entity, which cancels out the entire promise. Missing logical links – the Bulgarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs promises to take measure to remove doubts about Bulgaria’s bid to join the EU, because some EU countries have problems at home. Such statements are deprived of any logical consistency. Quotations – inverted commas are used for claims that need not be substantiated. This is the way most of the qualifications about Bulgaria are presented. Paradoxical nominations – organised crime, crime and corruption etc. Nominations whose reference is difficult to explain, the collocations are unmotivated but they become instilled in the discourse and recur as strong accusations. Using verbs of mental action and states rather than verbs of real action for the activities required of Bulgaria – raise concerns etc. Verbs of mental activity in the positive are a feature of the diplomatic language about Bulgaria.

Article 3. The headline of the third article highlights the phrase DELAY FOR BULGARIA AND ROMANIA, following the theme SCHENGEN ZONE.

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The analysis of the information structure and thematic organisation of the abstract is presented in Table 3.3: The Netherlands Theme

plans to delay until next year any decision on whether to let Bulgaria and Romania join Europe's passport-free Schengen zone. Rheme On whether

to let Bulgaria and Romania join Europe's passport-free Schengen zone

Table 3.3. Thematic organisation of the abstract. Therefore the Dutch plans to delay permitting Bulgaria to join are in focus in the abstract. Bulgaria – once again in tandem with Romania – is part of the rheme at a second level of analysis. It is the recipient of an action of blocking out of an EU structure. The role given to Bulgaria is passive and the organisation of the article ousts the country out of focus with the information structure. The next sentence presents what looks like a paradox – Bulgaria has been voted in, but the Dutch delay its membership. However, the logical structure of the sentence is not one of contrast: Dutch Immigration Minister Gerd Leers spoke of the delay just a day after the European Parliament had voted to let the two Balkan countries into Schengen The reader is left to recognise the juxtaposition between “delay” and “let into” without a proper contrastive linking word. An adversative link would be signalled, for instance, using ALTHOUGH: Dutch Immigration Minister Gerd Leers spoke of the delay ALTHOUGH just a day EARLIER the European Parliament had voted to let the two Balkan countries into Schengen But the structure of juxtaposition was not chosen and the reader is left with the impression that this sequence of acts is not paradoxical but a normal procedure. Moreover, the positive vote is placed in a position of the highest information value after a pre-placed adverbial – “just a day after”. The only word signalling some degree of irregularity is timing:

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JUST, highlighting the fact that the decision to let the countries into the Schengen zone is repealed so soon after being voted. This is known as conventional implicature (Yule 1996:45) – like lexical presuppositions, certain words result in conveying additional meanings, e.g. even, yet etc. The Dutch decision is then justified with the stipulation that Bulgaria needs the approval of each individual member state: Bulgaria and Romania – EU members since 2007 – need the approval of all 25 Schengen nations to join. The use of ALL – although it has not been established as a conventional implicature – is a factual presentation of the legal requirement, but probably also highlights the enormity of the task. The lack of the definite article – all THE 25 Schengen nations – as can be expected with the exhaustive reference of the phrase – speaks of an emotional expression rather than a factual claim. Further, with no signalled relation to the previous text, the reader is confronted with the concern about immigration from the Arab world: Arab world turmoil has fuelled concern about illegal migration to the EU. This is a one-sentence paragraph whose topic bears no relation to the topics discussed so far – Bulgaria’s admission to the Schengen zone, the vote of the European Parliament and the position of the Dutch government. The next sentence directs back to the topic of Schengen admissions: EU interior ministers are meeting in Luxembourg to review the Schengen zone rules. With an effort, a relation can be seen between reformulating EU policy to immigration and admitting Bulgaria to join. However, the connection with the situation in the Arab world still remains unclear. The effort to clarify it with the following sentence leads to a non-sequitur: Only minimal border checks are carried out within Schengen, though the treaty requires the member states to apply uniform controls on the EU's external borders. The adversative relation between the two parts of the sentence expressed with THOUGH signals juxtaposition, which is clearly seen

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between the Schengen internal borders and the external ones. Concerning the claims made for both, however, we have respectively MINIMAL BORDER CHECKS and UNIFORM CONTROLS. One would have thought that the binary opposite to MINIMAL is MAXIMAL. However, demanding MAXIMAL CHECKS on the borders of countries sounds quite frightening. The adjective UNIFORM presents an alternative that is more acceptable. Thus the reader is forced to construe – not without a certain difficulty – MINIMAL as opposed to UNIFORM. Otherwise the sentence appears built on a logical non-sequitur. As can be clearly seen, the line of argument about delaying the decision to let Bulgaria join the Schengen zone after an adverse vote in EU Parliament is followed by a totally different argument about EU regulations on border controls. While the second argument does not include Bulgaria explicitly in the text, the first one has the name of the country as a mute recipient affected by the action. Yet a third topic occurs about turmoil in the Arab World and illegal immigration, which further complicates the logical connectedness of the text in the absence of explicit connectors. Moreover, the next two paragraphs are about two border disputes: between France and Italy - about immigrants from North Africa; and between Germany and the Netherlands – about re-introduced border controls. Bulgaria is no part of that discourse. Within the framework of the worries about border security, Bulgaria comes into focus as an example from the past of a border incident. Table 3.4. presents the thematic structure The Netherlands Theme

plans to delay until next year any decision on whether to let Bulgaria and Romania join Europe's passport-free Schengen zone. Rheme On whether

to let Bulgaria and Romania join Europe's passport-free Schengen zone

Table 3.4. Thematic structure Once again the main rhematic structure is MIGRATION HOT SPOT, while Bulgaria is postponed to a second level of analysis. In effect, Bulgaria is a circumstantial addition to the migration concerns of EU countries.

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While the discourse is about border controls and immigration, however, the words of the Dutch Immigration Minister introduce the topic of judicial reform measures in Bulgaria: Mr Leers said Theme

“it is imperative that all adopted judicial reform measures in Romania and Bulgaria are effective and irreversible”. Rheme that all adopted judicial are effective and irreversible”. reform measures in Romania and Bulgaria Rheme Theme .

Table 3.5. Thematic structure So far, the oblique argument – not explicitly worded as such - that Denmark blocks Bulgaria (and Romania) from the Schengen area because of fears about its safety of immigrants from Arab countries entering from the Turkish/Bulgarian border stands quite well logically: unrest in some Arab countries; influx of refugees on the Turkish and Greek borders; Bulgaria as a new member – in need of improvement of border controls. A little less clear is the link to the judicial reform as a quoted reason for blocking the country. The Lisbon treaty divides the themes related to the area of freedom, security and justice into four fields: one is border control, another is police co-operation and the other two are related to judiciary matters (EU online). Therefore, judicial reform does not include border controls and this should be seen as a new accusation to Bulgaria, unrelated to the argument developed so far. The subheading of the next section projects a degree of positivity: MEPs give thumbs-up The expectation is that this part of the article is about approval for Bulgaria to join the Schengen zone. The metaphor THUMBS-UP is highlighted by the use of the empty verb GIVE. The metaphor has been preferred to “votes in favour”, which would have left the positive phrase in a circumstantial role. The suggestion that Bulgaria, together with Romania, is eligible for admission is made through a direct quotation of the words of the President of the EU Parliament. This, however, is not done as a whole-hearted support for the country. In effect, the wording presents a negation of the claim that their integration should be delayed:

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“The Schengen system is providing the highest standards of border management. Romania and Bulgaria are meeting these standards today hence, we MUST NOT DELAY their integration,” said parliament president Jerzy Buzek. The President does not use the verb of material action verb “integrate” but a nominalisation. The reason for this is to be able to modify its meaning with “delay”. Thus, Bulgaria is not rejected, barred or any other negative action. “Delay” is a verb that only relates to timing. The choice of the predicate “delay integration” in fact reveals an intention of the Parliament, which is negated under the strength of the evidence that Bulgaria meets the requirements for admission. What MEPs actually want to do is delay Bulgaria’s integration but they are forced to abandon the delay – which is also reinforced by the strong modality of MUST. The use of the continuous tense for “meeting those standards” is also odd – it would suggest a temporary activity, an action that is localised at a particular moment in time; it is not the case that the countries have this characteristic in general, they possess it at the specified moment in time. Therefore, the temporary nature of this characteristic is highlighted, as if it is of significance for the admission. Thus, instead of the claim that Bulgaria is eligible and should integrate into the Schengen zone, the EU President utters a statement that the delay cannot be maintained any longer. Next, a further hedge to the countries’ integration is added with the chairman’s remark that Bulgaria would need to improve its border cooperation with Greece and Turkey – a reintroduction of the concerns raised earlier in the article. The article ends with an enumeration of the countries which are not part of the Schengen zone – and the UK is one of these countries. Then the text reverts back to an earlier aside in the story – re-imposing border controls by Denmark, an act condemned by Germany. Mixing the two themes – re-imposing border controls within Schengen and fears of Bulgaria’s ability to guard Schengen’s external borders – lead to a broadly associative conclusion that rules for the former might be a solution to the latter in case Bulgaria were to gain admission. In this article conceptual arguments are outlined which are definitely inconsistent: Bulgaria is voted as fulfilling the requirements for the Schengen zone, but the Netherlands blocks it from joining; fears are described of a lack of capacity to stop illegal immigration from outside Europe, yet, the Dutch block Bulgaria because the judicial reforms are not irreversible; the EU President proposes admitting Bulgaria by negating the

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claim that it should be delayed further. Throughout the article Bulgaria appears as an affected participant or in a circumstantial role, without an opportunity to make a statement or perform an action that might give a positive impression. It seems as if Bulgaria is not significant enough to be discussed in its own right but only as part of the larger problem of border security; and always in tandem with Romania. Thus Bulgaria is a passive participant in the discourse about Schengen admissions on the BBC web pages. EU officials are quoted to urge for a fight against corruption and organised crime, but the flaws remain formulated metaphorically and thus present no real directive for action per se. The consequences of an admission are equally vague and the BBC presents them as such. An adamant aversion to let Bulgaria join the Schengen zone garnered in an empty discourse can be seen regarding this topic. Linguistic devices for defaming established with this article: Ousting Bulgaria out of the focus of the sentence. Bulgaria is a circumstantial complement to the theme or rheme, but not part of the actual information structure. Conjunctions reveal developments in a paradoxical relation: Dutch Immigration Minister Gerd Leers spoke of the delay ALTHOUGH just a day EARLIER the European Parliament had voted to let the two Balkan countries into Schengen Sweeping generalisations – ALL 25 states, not all the 25 states. Illogical links Only minimal border checks are carried out within Schengen, though the treaty requires the member states to apply uniform controls on the EU's external borders. Nominalisations substitute processes: we MUST NOT DELAY their integration Verbs relate to timing, not action.

Article 4. The fourth article is remarkable with its text structure which conveys a message totally different from the purported aim. The title is: EU free movement of labour map It contains a short introduction and a map with interactive links which call up information about each country and its policy towards immigrant

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workers. The EU member-countries before 2004 – i.e. the West of Europe during the cold war – are provided with links, while the newly included countries – in effect, the former communist bloc – have no links. This is the first level of separating countries –West and East, old Europe and new accessions, capitalist countries and ex-communist ones. The former allow or restrict workers from the latter. The article is built as a list of approaches applied to the ex-communist countries by the older members of the European Union. While the headline features FREE MOVEMENT OF LABOUR, the text is a catalogue of the restrictions to the free movement of labourers from the former communist bloc. The terms of reference split the former communist countries into two groups – the 2004 entrants, on the one hand, and Bulgaria and Romania, also called the 2007 entrants – on the other. A summary table on the webpage presents the attitudes to the two groups in mostly positive terms: open doors for 2004 entrants and open doors for 2007 entrants. This is contrasted with the third rubric “subject to restrictions”. Each rubric is followed by an enumeration of the countries applying these policies. The abstract features Belgium’s plan to lift restrictions on workers from “most of the new EU member states” and emphasises that it is the last to do so in the EU. However, the very next sentence has as its predicate “will keep restrictions in place”. The recipient of the verbal action is workers from Bulgaria and Romania. Belgium plans to lift restrictions on workers from most of the new EU member states - THE LATEST TO DO SO in the 27-nation bloc. But it WILL KEEP RESTRICTIONS IN PLACE for workers from Bulgaria and Romania, the newest EU members, which joined on 1 January 2007. The next paragraph has a conjoined structure where the second predicate is ‘still face barriers’. The agent of the action is workers from the former communist countries and the circumstance are European countries. In May 2004 eight other former communist states joined the EU - and their workers STILL FACE BARRIERS in some European countries. The conventional implicature STILL suggests that this is a situation which will soon be overcome. A further hedge is the quantification of the countries where such barriers are faced – SOME countries. The next sentence is about restrictions as well but presented in a rather devious way:

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Some of the countries which imposed no curbs on workers from those eight countries - or lifted them in May 2006 - imposed curbs on Bulgarians and Romanians. The main verb is “imposed curbs”, and the recipients are Bulgarians and Romanians. The subject is modified with a clause containing the same predicate in the negative – “imposed no curbs”, with recipient – the 2004 entrants. The second clause is synonymous but presents material action “lifted (the curbs)”. In effect, the agent has no clear reference – “some of the countries”. The reference is specified with the two types of actions – imposing no curbs or lifting them. The action these countries perform is to impose curbs again, this time – on Bulgarians and Romanians. The author did not even try to avoid the repetition. This complicated proposition, in effect, reifies the necessity of curbs, which happen to be imposed on Bulgarians and Romanians, after being initially lifted. While suggesting that most restrictions are lifted in the abstract of the article, each sentence later in the text is about restrictions and curbs. Not surprisingly, the proposition which has “free movement of workers” as its theme is introduced with an adversative BUT: But free movement of workers is a fundamental right in the EU. Paradoxically, the next sentence has a positive form of the predicate CAN BE MAINTAINED with the subject CURBS. So the curbs CAN BE MAINTAINED for a maximum of seven years until May 2011 in the case of workers from the eight countries that joined in 2004, and until 2014 in the case of workers from Bulgaria and Romania. The amount of details about the maximal terms of retaining the curbs for the two groups of new EU entrants makes them a very special part of the text – in fact, they are the rheme of this sentence. Thus what is under discussion is how long restrictions on workers from the former communist bloc can be prolonged, rather than lifting them to create the free movement of labour presented with the headline. The EU directive for free movement is presented as an obstacle to placing restrictions. In effect, the rest of the article suggests ways to legally restrict the rights of workers and proposes justifications for that. The textual structure gives this impression –rather than orienting restricted workers how to gain access, and thereby taking the side of those less privileged, the BBC advises how to keep Eastern European immigrants away from the West without breaking EU laws.

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Finally, the introduction rounds up with the metaphoric action “threw open their doors to Bulgarians and Romanians”, which is predicated of another vaguely denoted subject – “most countries”: Most of the countries which threw open their doors to Bulgarian and Romanian workers joined the EU in 2004. In effect, the referent of the action are the former communist countries and the sentence means that mostly former communist countries imposed no restrictions on their fellow ex-communist-bloc countries from the later wave of accession. Thus the former communist countries are presented as a cohesive group of their own, quite apart from the rest of Europe. The text about each of the countries which were EU members before 2004 is structured on a common template. Firstly, there is a section about imposing and lifting restrictions on the 2004 entrants. The second section specifies policies towards the 2007 entrants – Bulgaria and Romania. They include issuing/simplifying work permits – in a fast-track procedure, in some cases; restricting the workers from benefits; allowing privileges for jobs difficult to fill with nationals of the country. The conditions for issuing work permits are scrupulously pointed out. Behind this positive formulation transpires the action of actually restricting labour from the communist countries, because this is what work permits are for – to allow only individuals with permits to work in the respective countries. In effect, work permits are an impediment to the free movement of labour, directing workers to industries where they are allowed is another restriction. Imposing no restrictions is highlighted with a special predicate: was one of the three countries, which is repeated for each of the three countries, naming them at each recurrence. This is followed with explanations why restrictions became necessary for Bulgaria and Romania later: Sweden was ONE OF THE THREE COUNTRIES, along with the UK and Ireland, which chose to apply no restrictions to workers from the new EU member states... The UK WAS ONE OF THE THREE COUNTRIES, along with Ireland and Sweden, to place no restrictions on workers from the 2004 entrants... The Republic of Ireland WAS ONE OF THREE COUNTRIES which opened up its labour markets to all new member states immediately in 2004....

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This exceptional predicate is followed by an adversative structure: It did, HOWEVER, introduce new rules whereby immigrants from all EU countries - not just the new members - would be ineligible for benefits for two years. HOWEVER, workers have to register and only become eligible for benefits such as Jobseeker's Allowance and income support after working continuously in the UK for at least a year. Only the text about Sweden continues with a positive presentation: It has taken THE SAME liberal line with regard to workers from Bulgaria and Romania. Some of the country profiles also specify justifications for restricting labourers, and they include close proximity to the ex-communist countries, high levels of unemployment in the recipient countries, an unexpectedly big influx of immigrants etc. The explanations abound in detail about the enormity of the immigrant wave: After an UNEXPECTEDLY LARGE INFLUX of workers from Central Europe - AN ESTIMATED 600,000 in two years - the UK announced that it would impose restrictions on workers from Bulgaria and Romania. The theme is exceptionally long to cushion the impact of the verbiage of the main verb: impose restrictions, in effect – the rheme of this sentence. This creates the impression of hedging and conjuring reasons for this unpopular move. The justifications for restricting Eastern Europeans include quotations form EU officials: “In practice Germany has given as many people work as other big countries,” EU EMPLOYMENT COMMISSIONER Vladimir Spidla said in May 2006. Here the distinction between East and West, ex-communist and capitalist countries is construed in terms of size – BIG COUNTRIES. The tendency to give an excess of explanations for why restrictions were imposed is visible. The accumulation of such details raises the argument that keeping new Europeans at home is a policy which can be

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better motivated in practical terms, inasmuch as only one reason is given for the adverse opinion – the fundamental human right of free movement. The recurrent textual component of restrictions for Bulgarians and Romanians makes it a natural part of the textual scheme, and, thereby - of the overall message of the article. Imposing and lifting curbs for the 2004 entrants is taken for granted, as is the fact that restrictions should be in place for Bulgarians. The text structure reifies this state of matters in reality. The tendency to steer away from the tell-tale reference former communist countries is not quite successful. It occurs 5 times, whereas the coinage 2004/2007 entrants is used 8 times. Moreover, they split into two groups – those who gained admission in 2004 and Bulgaria and Romania, the 2007 entrants. In fact, ‘former communist countries’ is used as an umbrella term for the two groups, while ‘entrants’ collocates with 2004 to denote the first group. In effect, this article revives the split between the East and the West of Europe. The West is presented as vehemently struggling to fend against a massive invasion of workers from the East, against the backdrop of EU’s requirement for free movement of labour, which they are trying to overcome with politically correct formulations of the restrictions they need to protect against the easterners. Neither the positive terms of reference, nor the structure of the text conceal the fact that free movement of labour from the East to the West is undesirable. Bulgaria is at the worst affected end of the argument, being part of the second wave of accession together with Romania. Linguistic devices for defaming established with this article: Paradoxical nominations – free movement of labour, open-doors policy - when the reverse is meant. Conventional implicature – STILL face barriers. Conjunctions reveal developments in a paradoxical relation: BUT free movement of workers is a fundamental right in the EU. Abundance of detail - how the EU’s requirement for free movement of labour can be circumvented Exclusive nominations - ONE OF THE THREE COUNTRIES which chose to apply no restrictions to workers from the new EU member states – to reify the fact that the action is not natural. Overlexicalisation – for the reasons why workers from the 2007accession countries can not be allowed to the labour market.

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Imposing a template to reify roles – presenting the former communist countries and the policies to keep them out of the labour market in “older European countries” Relexicalisations: 2004 admissions and 2007 entrants for the former communist countries; open-doors policy – special measures to restrict labour from Eastern Europe. Attaching modal verbs to the genuinely desired action - the curbs CAN BE MAINTAINED for a maximum of seven years. The desired action is to maintain curbs.

Conclusion The discourse about Bulgaria joining the Schengen zone Bulgaria features in four articles published over a period of 4 years. An article a year is a frequency which reveals little interest in the topic and country. The talk is of blocking Bulgaria from joining the Schengen area, alongside financial penalties for various wrongdoings. The succession of the events is this: firstly, threats are issued; then Germany and France block Bulgaria; then the Netherlands delay Bulgaria’s accession. At the same time, the European Parliament votes Bulgaria as meeting the criteria for joining the Schengen zone and a report is commissioned by the EC which would advise member states on the preparedness of the countries for joining the Schengen zone – after the major members have issued their negative decisions. What keeps Bulgaria out is the need of a unanimous decision of all the EU countries – presented as out of reach for Bulgaria and Romania. Overwhelmingly, Bulgaria occurs as a circumstance as can be seen in Table 3.5. Tesniere (1959) juxtaposes actant and circonstant, and, as can be seen, Bulgaria is never actant but always - circonstant. Clearly, Bulgaria is not in the centre of the reality created by the BBC with its discourse, but comes on the fringes of a different argument – in our corpus, the case of guarding the borders of the EU from illegal immigrants. However, being in prepositional positions does not always give the country the function of a fringe element to the discourse. In example 7 above the circumstantial phrase introduces the doer of the action in a passive structure and thereby highlights the agency. Likewise, the nominalised phrases in which the country name occurs also are not a part of a grand mystification. The nominalisation “delay” only appears to hide the agency of who is imposing a delay but in effect it places the agents of the action in a rhematic position, thus giving them a position of a new and significant piece of information. In effect, on all occasions the agency is clear. Thus my data forces me to admit that post-

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prepositional placement and nominalisations are not necessarily a sign of sidelining participants. In effect, in my corpus they serve as components postponing the respective parts to positions of greater significance in the text structure.

Nr 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Main part

Prep. Phrase

fuelling EU concern about border security all adopted judicial reform measures

in neighbouring Bulgaria and Romania

there are “powerful forces The European Commission is planning to block almost $1bn in funds The EU has already frozen hundreds of millions' worth of aid destined Costly projects to upgrade border controls are also under suspicion of fraud, raising fears there had also been a lack of progress

in Romania and Bulgaria in the Bulgarian government and/or other state institutions” for Bulgaria for Bulgaria's roads and agriculture about Bulgaria's chances of joining the Schengen border-free area by Romania and Bulgaria

Table 3.5. Bulgaria in circumstantial roles

Bulgaria is often subject to passive structures presenting the country as affected by the actions of the European Union or its organs: Romania and Bulgaria blocked from joining Schengen zone (headline) The occasions when Bulgaria is given the role of subject include cases when Bulgarian officials make statements and are quoted by the BBC, semantically characterised as SAYER: Romania condemned the decision, while Bulgaria promised to “do its utmost” to remove doubts about its membership. Bulgarian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Vessela Cherneva told AFP: “We are aware that the political situation in some EU member countries

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is complicated. For that reason, we will do our utmost to remove any doubts, including in the areas of the judicial system and society as a whole.” Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev dismissed the allegations Further, the cases when Bulgaria is bestowed agentive role also present negative action on the part of Bulgaria: …the Bulgarian authorities have not fully explained or clarified the situation surrounding the irregularities and have not taken all necessary steps to correct them – which is a direct quotation of an anonymous EU official. …Romania was marking time, while Bulgaria had gone backwards. Thus, the number of subject positions is equal to the number of circumstantial ones. The semantic nature of the verbs, however, places Bulgaria in a position of explaining wrongdoings, or being affected by the actions of others. It is subject to ascriptive claims, in effect – prevaricating about its state - or to passive structures when the country is affected by the actions of others. The fact that Bulgaria is highlighted as the agent of regress or hiding negative facts from its people contributes to building a particularly bad image. Another issue is that the agencies chosen for reference by the BBC from Bulgaria are officials, representatives of the power bloc in the country. On one single occasion does the BBC evoke the opposition: The opposition is preparing to table a motion of no confidence the day after the document is adopted in Brussels. The fleeting reference to opposition is isolated and there is no follow up to reveal its impact. And while the official authorities are accused of such wrongdoings, the opposition remains only once and very vaguely mentioned at all. A specific technique of back-grounding is that Bulgaria appears as the second part of a co-ordinated phrase: Romania and Bulgaria. When this is not the case, a clause is added comparing the two countries. Except for the first article, the two countries are indiscriminately bundled together, to the extent that the two judiciaries appear common and indistinguishable from each other. The comparisons, as shown above, are entirely in favour of

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Romania. Notable, however, is the fact that the only signed article is written by a Romanian national, Oana Lungescu, introduced as the BBC’s European affairs correspondent. It may be a coincidence that the BBC correspondent happened to be Romanian, who clearly presented events to give Bulgaria a bad image so as to let her country appear positive in the contrast, but he BBC provided the medium. The terms of reference to the country are mainly toponyms or personal names. Appositions attributed to the country name add mainly negative qualifications: Bulgaria and Romania - EU members since 2007 Bulgaria, the EU's poorest country. Both present facts about the country. The first focuses on how late Bulgaria managed to gain admission to the European Union and has direct relation to the timing of its claim for the Schengen zone. The second proceeds from statistics and has relevance for the topic of losing access to EU funds. Neither projects positive attitude, both position Bulgaria negatively in the minds of the readers. In the third place, other references leading back to Bulgaria include the phrase: “make sure the generous support it receives from the EU actually reaches its citizens and is not siphoned off by corrupt officials, operating together with organized crime” These are the qualifications in a report about Bulgaria, but the fact the BBC report chose to quote them is significant about the attitude to Bulgaria. And further: “powerful forces in the Bulgarian government and/or other state institutions” who are not interested in punishing the corruption. In the corpus, we also find references to specific Bulgarian people who are mentioned in the coverage of the country. They include the then Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev. Apart from being quoted to reject claims about Bulgaria, his government is called “beleaguered”: the troubles of Mr. Stanishev's beleaguered government

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Their troubles, indeed, were many and the government could not win re-election. But the BBC fails to draw a distinction between Mr. Stanishev’s government and Bulgaria, garnering its articles with the public statements only of these officials. Indeed, the other figure named as projecting the image of the country is the interior minister in the same government: But earlier this year, the powerful interior minister was forced to step down after revelations he had secretly met two alleged crime bosses and some of his officials were leaking confidential information to mafia suspects. It appears as if the terms of reference to the government repeat “power”, however, the predications feature administrative weakness. This range of terms of reference shows an orientation to a power block in Bulgaria which projects might but is associated with negative activities. In effect, the terms of reference are found to be in close relation to the range of actors included in the discourse. In effect, we see Bulgaria as a passive recipient of quite aggressive but inarticulately voiced measures from the EU. The words of EU officials are presented with the hedge of inverted commas, without explicit logical links to the overall structure of the articles. The qualifications more often than not are metaphoric, therefore creating associations rather than naming concrete objects. The attributes are never taxonomic and generally deprived of concrete meaning. The effect of the specific “eurospeak” is created by using verbs of mental activities rather than of material action. Thus the claims affect thinking, assessing, projecting, rather than concrete deeds. This conceals the actual picture; in effect, the quoted eurodocuments refrain from naming concrete actions that evoke disapproval, but formulate evaluative mental activity. Secondly, the preference for positive statements is evident, even when a negative meaning is conveyed. Thus the language is non-conflictive and does not allow for challenges. Negative statements are used to circumvent making hard claims. Thirdly, taxonomic or binary adjectives are avoided and transformed into gradable ones, which take away the definitive value of the statements. In the fourth place, statements tend to affect time rather than the nature of the verbal activity, thus making the statements easier to accept – not Bulgaria is not ready for admission, but it is “premature” to admit Bulgaria. The BBC clearly identifies these features of “eurospeak”, quotes them between inverted commas leaving the reader to guess whether they sympathise with the qualifications. However, the image of Bulgaria is created through such

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refined discriminatory statements lined with little substance but definitive dislike. The general impression is that Bulgaria is not wanted in the Schengen zone and vague explanations are voiced to motivate keeping it out while the Parliament votes it in. The cogency of the logical links within the texts is often problematic. A report of misused agricultural funds is subtitled “mafia killings”; border controls are enmeshed with legal reforms; corruption occurs in tandem with organised crime. The connections between these issues beg the question in the BBC articles for this corpus, but presenting them as stable collocations reifies their status as joint entities, while instilling the perception that the logical links exist. The profile Bulgaria cuts is one of inefficiency, passivity and several negative features of government. The negative image is also predicated by the fact that a Romanian is authorized to write about Bulgaria and seek out contrasts with her native country. Most of the Bulgarians that are given the floor to prevaricate and promise, obviously cornered by accusations. Not a single Bulgarian is presented in a position to make a positive statement about Bulgaria, and this is the way the BBC structured their discourse about Bulgaria.

CHAPTER FOUR CORPUS ASSISTED DISCOURSE STUDIES

A new direction in CDA is input from Corpus linguistics. This methodological extension has been given the name of Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) Mautner (2009). With a view of its impact on discourse studies, Partington (2003: 12) presents a scalar view of the uses of CL methodology: at the simplest level, corpus technology helps find other examples of a phenomenon one has already noted; at the other extreme, it reveals patterns of use previously unthought of. In between, it can reinforce, refute or revise a researcher’s intuition and show them why and how much their suspicions were grounded. Such a range of methodological opportunities points towards a rationale for using CLrelated methods to carry out CDA. In practical terms, Corpus Linguistics contributes to Critical Discourse Analysis in three significant ways: (1) by providing material for study in the shape of corpora; (2) by ensuring search and retrieval techniques to enable researchers to deal with extremely large databases; (3) by acting as an alternative research method to triangulate the results of other discourse analytical procedures.

Providing material for CDA Creative collaboration between Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis can be traced back to the twentieth century Krishnamurthy (1996), Stubbs (1994, 1996), to mention but a few authors who have written in this field. The theoretical underpinnings of social research lie in Stubbs’ (1996: 195) argument that if a collocation becomes more common in the language, then it is more likely to get fixed in the minds of speakers and therefore, more difficult to challenge. Circulating such phrases is one way that various opinion-makers spread their ideologies, more often than not – via the media. The means of discovering such phenomena is in the hands of corpus linguistics. Having started from humble beginnings, an upsurge in the use of corpora is noted in recent years, as are different findings about the role of

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co-text, the intensity of material, the semantic nature of collocates etc. which lead to conclusions about the social role of language use. The scope of these theoretical methods is such that in a collection of articles in CDA from 2007, Fairclough (2007:275) encounters that one in five uses corpus methods. There are good reasons for a synergy between CDA and CL and some have been summarised in the burgeoning literature on the issue. In the first place, Fairclough (1989: 54) highlights reasons why corpora are the site where ideological uses of language are to be sought: the hidden power of media discourse and the capacity of . . . power-holders to exercise this power depend on systematic tendencies in news reporting and other media activities. A single text on its own is quite insignificant: the effects of media power are cumulative, working through the repetition of particular ways of handling causality and agency, particular ways of positioning the reader, and so forth.

This makes it indispensible for the analyst to have in mind huge collections of material – in effect, corpora. Quite a lot of resources are now available to researchers seeking to discover politically significant language occurrences. Ready-made corpora can be obtained from Wordbanks Online – a 500+ million word corpus, which is commercially distributed; LexisNexis, News Bank – a collection of UK newspapers, also available for buyers etc. An alternative to those ready-made corpora has always been the task-based, purpose-built corpus compiled by researchers with a view of a concrete task in hand. Moreover, electronic facilities exist to assist with this task – from the in-built function of the Wordsmith to collect corpora, to the Bootcat software (Baroni and Bernardini 2004) which can collect corpora on a topic of a researcher’s choice. Corpora are instrumental in ensuring the representative nature of the material selected for research. Numerical criteria are available in corpus building as part of the discipline. Various numbers have been quoted as the size of a corpus that ensures representativeness. The size of the corpus depends very much on the type of questions that are going to be asked of it. “As a rule of thumb, bigger is generally considered to be better as the software can be instructed to filter out some of the output. However, it is possible to get much useful data from a small corpus, particularly when investigating high frequency items.”(Evans 2006:1) Ensuring representativeness can also be done via randomisation (Mautner 2009:130) - selecting random articles from a previously chosen pool of data. Thus the researcher can protect against voluntary choices. An alternative suggestion – although much debated – is the cyclic method of

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collecting material, obtaining data, then topping up the corpus with more data and checking whether the results reveal change. When nothing new is observed in the results and the new material is felt to bring about more of the same, then the corpus can be said to be representative. Ooi (2001: 179) suggests that “the optimal size [of a corpus] can be reached only when the collection of more texts does not shed any more light on its lexicogrammatical or discourse patterning”. A similar test is the so-called saturation: the notion of “saturation” (also known as “closure”, see McEnery et al 2006:15-16) can be tested for by taking a corpus and dividing it into equal sections in terms of number of words. If another section of the same size is now added, the number of new items in the new section should be approximately the same as in the other sections. A practical consideration concerning corpora collected to research social phenomena is the fact that new material inevitably brings in different aspects of the phenomenon as it evolves in time – new topics, new participants, newly evolved genres of writing about them etc. That is why I am going to argue that in terms of the image of a country, representativeness should be ensured by exploring all the material about the country over a set period of time. This guarantees that nothing is left out and the selection is not biased in favour of specific considerations.

Parsing the Corpora The second aspect where Corpus Linguistics has been a boon to CDA concerns handling large collections of language material presented with corpora. Software for parsing exists in abundance these days: Wordcruncher, Wordsmith, Monoconc etc. In effect, these instruments “crunch” the text into its component words and calculate various parameters of the word occurrences in the corpus – from the number of instances each word is realised in a text to the words it collocates with. The big question is how such findings can contribute to the analysis of discourse, which, in a way, can be believed to be in-depth and inseparable from its context, delving beyond the visible and into the implied and semi-articulated. Quantitative measures, such as salient frequencies, have been known to direct to significant aspects in the text. CL is known to apply two types of approaches: quantitative and qualitative. The former include exploring frequencies of occurrence. Raw frequencies are the number of occurrences of a word in a corpus. However, Zipf (1932) established that function words and words of more general meaning top such lists, while notional words are rarer. That is why researchers tend to use normalised frequencies acquired via different

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procedures (Biber et al 1998:29) – calculating occurrences per one hundred, or one thousand words. Alternatively, when the frequency list of words from a text is collated with the frequency list of a reference corpus a key word list is derived. Thus, keyness is defined as the statistically significantly higher frequency of particular words or clusters in the corpus under analysis in comparison with another corpus, either a general reference corpus, or a comparable specialized corpus. Its purpose is to point towards the “aboutness” of a text or homogeneous corpus (Scott, 1999), that is, its topic and the central elements of its content. It shows which words occur in the respective corpus with a frequency higher than the one in the reference corpus and which – with a frequency lower than that. In the case of higher frequency, we detect that a lot has been written about the issue; conversely, a lower frequency signals a lack of interest in the concept denoted with the word. It is established that higher frequency is observed for proper nouns – either personal or place names, indicating the participants and places featured in the corpus; or grammatical words, such as would or shall, which reveal dominant abstract meanings, like modality or tense; or common nouns, in which case they point to concepts prominent in a text. Thus the researcher can concentrate their attention on words which stand out in their corpus – both in being overexploited and underexploited. A different type of frequency is computed for words which occur together in a corpus. They are known as collocates. The definition of collocation is the above-chance frequent co-occurrence of two words within a pre-determined span, usually five words on either side of the word under investigation (the node) (Sinclair, 1991). The statistical calculation of collocation is based on three measures: the frequency of the node, the frequency of the collocates, and the frequency of the collocation. Their frequency of co-occurrence is measured by their mutual information (MI) or T-score. MI is “a measure of how strongly the words seem to associate in a corpus, based on the independent relative frequency of the two words” (Hunstan 2002:73). It is independent of the size of the corpus and allows comparisons to be made between corpora of different sizes. It gives information about the idiomatic uses of a word. The highest values characterise less frequent words with restricted collocations. T-score, for its part, is a measure of how certain we can be that a collocation is not the result of vagaries in a corpus. It depends on the size of a corpus and its values do not allow comparisons between different corpora. The information relates to the grammatical behaviour of a word. High values of this measure are typical of frequent – often function – words that occur together with many other words.

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In the technical description of Wordsmith (Scott 2008) a cluster is defined as “a group of words which follow each other in a text.” No associations with idiomatic structure are made, or with grammatical constructions. The tool establishes them as words which are found repeatedly together in sequence. They represent a tighter relationship than collocates, more like multi-word units or groups or phrases. They are called clusters because “groups” and “phrases” are defined differently in grammar. Biber and Barbieri (2007) call such groups “lexical bundles” and associate them with style-specific lexis. The fact that they are simply found together in software does not guarantee they are true multi-word units. However, it has been used as a measure of associative ties among words. Again, they exist in two variants – those which are derived from key-word lists are KEY WORD CLUSTERS and represent the clustering of words established to be key, while clusters from the raw frequencies do not vie for key status and are indicators of co-occurrence of any words. A useful statistical concept is c-collocates. It was established with the RASIM project (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008, Baker et al 2008:287). Their corpus was large - 140 million words, purpose built and included different type of sources: twelve national and three regional newspapers. It also covered an extended period of time: from 1996 to 2005. The materials also differed according to the type of journalism – some of the newspapers belonged to the sophisticated form of reporting in the broadsheet papers, others were tabloids. This, together with the period of time, served as a benchmark for splitting the texts into several sub-corpora. Consistent collocates, or c-collocates were considered those present in at least seven of the ten annual subcorpora. “With a view of weeding out terms that were typical of specific periods of time, or newspapers – called ‘seasonal’ by the researchers, a comparison among the corpora was conducted to establish the constant collocates.”(Gabrielatos and Baker 2008) As shown earlier, CL can provide general statistics of the data, mainly in terms of frequencies: number of words, mean sentence length, dominant collocations or clusters. Recently, CL has also been used to provide an overall patterning of the data: the number of texts per period and/or newspaper, in sub-corpora. This helps pinpoint specific periods for text selection through the so-called down-sampling. Thus, for instance, Baker (2011) establishes peaks in publications about Muslims in the British Press and relates them to specific historical events. Collocations and co-texts are explored with a view of various semantic categories. Researchers try to elicit what types of meanings emerge from recurrent patterning. The category called “semantic preference” refers to semantic aspects; it is the relation “between a lemma or word form and a

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set of semantically related words” (Stubbs, 2001: 65). For example, the two-word cluster “glass of” shows a semantic preference for the set of words to do with cold drinks (water, milk, lemonade, etc.) Semantic prosody, for its part, is evaluative. It reveals the speaker’s/writer’s stance; it is the “consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates” (Louw, 1993: 157). Discourse prosody, also evaluative, ‘extends over more than one unit in a linear string’ (Stubbs, 2001: 65). Stubbs provides the example of the lemma CAUSE, which ‘occurs overwhelmingly often with words for unpleasant events’ (Stubbs, 2001). Doubts have been voiced about the use of corpora as well. Mautner (2009:124) notes that in the cases where the phenomenon under investigation is played out on a larger textual stage, or realised through unpredictable lexical realisations, CL can be of little help to the discourse analyst. But similar caution has been given against “deep parsing” – searching material that is too small. Thus, the researcher should always have in mind the representativeness of the material they are exploring and apply more than one method to triangulate the results. Qualitative methods of CL are applied via looking at concordance lines. A concordance presents the instances of a word or cluster with the words on either side of the word/cluster in focus. The researcher can sort them alphabetically or by their frequency, by the word immediately to the right or left, or the second, third etc. words. Finally, concordance lines can be expanded up to the whole text. The RAS project (Baker et al, 2008:29) claims to have provided evidence that “qualitative” techniques can be employed, even when the corpus is extremely large, while also retaining the “quantitative” aspect. This is further evidence that CL methodology is “much more than bean counting”. Importantly, the RAS and RASIM projects demonstrate that “qualitative” findings can be quantified, and that “quantitative” findings need to be interpreted in the light of existing theories, and lead to their adaptation, or the formulation of new ones. Thirdly, CL data corroborate CDA findings and thus triangulate the conclusions. Discourse analytical procedures are very different from those of CL. When a material processed through the two methods yields comparable outcomes then the data can be said to truly reflect an existing situation. Overall, each approach can be used to help triangulate the findings of the other, taking into account the coherence, or lack of it, of the findings and the theoretical frameworks informing CDA and CL.

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Corpora The corpora were put together from all the articles published on the BBC website over a period of five years – 2007 - 2012. The search terms – Bulgaria OR Bulgarian – returned as much material as had been published by the media. The corpus was only purged of articles where Bulgaria is mentioned in enumerations, or incidental, casual mentions. No stop words were assigned. The overall size is 188,480 tokens (running words) in text. Details are given in Table 4.1. N tokens (running types (distinct words)words) in text tokens type/token used for ratio word (TTR) list standardised sum of entries TTR types (distinct words) type/token ratio (TTR) standardised TTR standardised TTR std.dev. standardised TTR basis mean word length (in characters) word length std.dev. sentences mean (in words) std.dev. paragraphs mean (in words) std.dev.

Overall 188,480 12,500 184,655 6.77 44.21 12,500 6.77 44.21 54.92 2.58 9,008 1,000 20.50 4.81 10.65 2.58 9,008 593 20.50 10.65 593 311.39 499.83

Table 4.1. Main Corpus statistics This is a small corpus, however, the representativeness is guaranteed by the fact that all the material about Bulgaria is included. Increasing the time span would bring in more material, but attitudes to a country can change over time and it makes sense to focus on periods of relevant consistency. The years selected for this study span the period of Bulgaria’s accession to the EU until 2012 when a massive hysteria started against a potential influx of immigrants to the UK in view of the date 2014, when EU regulations require lifting restrictions for Bulgarians on the UK labour market. The corpus was subdivided into sub-corpora for the respective years and for the different topics established in the corpus. Splitting the corpus into smaller subcorpora is significant for monitoring the attitude

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throughout a specific year marked with its outstanding events and the attitudes they fed. Besides, it allows testing the research mechanisms for the study. For the purposes of comparison 3 supplementary corpora were created. They include the articles on the BBC website collected with search terms Belgium OR Belgian, Denmark OR Danish, Netherlands OR Holland OR Dutch, Finland OR Finnish. A time period is set – the year 2008. The details are presented in Table 4.2. Denmark N type/token ratiotext (TTR) file standardised file TTR size tokens standardised (running words) TTR std.dev. in text tokens used for word list sum of entries types (distinct words) type/token ratio (TTR) standardised TTR standardised TTR std.dev. standardised TTR basis mean word length (in characters) word length std.dev. sentences mean (in words) std.dev. paragraphs mean (in words) std.dev.

Overall Overall 182,097 30,189 29,488 5,230 17.74 45.22 47.92 1,000 4.77 2.53 1,465 20.13 10.73 78 378.05 379.15

Finland N types (distinct text words) file type/token ratiofile (TTR) size tokens (running standardised words) inTTR text tokens used for word list sum of entries types (distinct words) type/token ratio (TTR) standardised TTR standardised TTR std.dev. standardised TTR basis mean word length (in characters) word length std.dev. sentences mean (in words) std.dev. paragraphs mean (in words) std.dev.

Overall Overall 115,767 19,573 19,081 3,221 16.88 41.34 49.93 1,000 4.67 2.47 902 21.16 10.47 59 323.41 577.12

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Belgium N tokens used for word text file list sum offile entries size tokens (running types (distinct words)words) in text tokens used for word list sum of entries types (distinct words) type/token ratio (TTR) standardised TTR standardised TTR std.dev. standardised TTR basis mean word length (in characters) word length std.dev. sentences mean (in words) std.dev. paragraphs mean (in words) std.dev.

Overall Overall 148,254 24,251 23,817 4,390 18.43 46.10 44.99 1,157 1,000 20.59 4.84 10.61 2.60 1,157 84 283.54 20.59 10.61 84 283.54 264.63

Table 4.2. Supplementary corpora for 2007 For the purposes of a second comparison of the coverage of former communist countries 2 more corpora were compiled from the web site of the BBC – for Romania and Poland for the year 2010. The corpora are described in Table 4.3. Keyword lists were devised using the British National Corpus - World as the reference corpus. The British National Corpus which “… aims to represent the universe of contemporary British English [and] to capture the full range of varieties of language use.” (Aston & Burnard 1998:5). On this occasion, the key-ness is calculated via log likelihood. The words whose frequency exceeds that in the reference corpus, a relation is known as positive key-ness, are the object of investigation as they show major notions discussed with the coverage and are likely to establish themselves in the mind of the readers (Stubbs 1996). The data were analysed using Wordsmith Tools (Scott 2008).

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Romania

Poland

N sum of text entries file types (distinctfile words) size tokens (running type/token words) ratio in (TTR) text tokens used for word list sum of entries types (distinct words) type/token ratio (TTR) standardised TTR standardised TTR std.dev. standardised TTR basis mean word length (in characters) word length std.dev. sentences mean (in words) std.dev. paragraphs mean (in words) std.dev.

Overall Overall 271,250 43,914 42,855 6,275 14.64 45.88 43.25 1,000 4.78 2.54 2,108 20.33 11.38 130 329.65 278.22

N types (distinct text words) file type/token ratio file (TTR) size tokens (running standardised words) inTTR text tokens used for word list sum of entries types (distinct words) type/token ratio (TTR) standardised TTR standardised TTR std.dev. standardised TTR basis mean word length (in characters) word length std.dev. sentences mean (in words) std.dev. paragraphs mean (in words) std.dev.

Overall Overall 8,544 513,258 10.22 85,157 44.63 83,638 8,544 10.22 44.63 49.49 1,000 4.82 2.54 3,963 21.11 10.86 275 304.14 302.90

Table 4.3. Supplementary corpora for 2010.

Analytical Assumptions Based on the assumption that the keywords reveal the “about-ness” of texts, I use the key-word lists for each country as an indicator of what concepts stand out in the coverage of each country. In view of the fact that often repeated words are fixed in the minds of the public (Stubbs 1996), I expect that these words cumulatively build the image of the respective country. The comparison among the coverage of the different countries will reveal what type of events dominates the material about each country. Zooming in on the material, researchers have established that proper names, nationality adjectives and toponyms dominate the keyword lists. However, no studies discuss the significance of each category. That is why I study the proper names, toponyms, nationality names and common nouns separately in a comparative perspective among the countries to establish what conclusions are to be made of the dominance in each category. From the auxiliary corpora conclusion rules are derived what the significance of the dominance of the different types of keywords is. Then the mechanism is applied to the main corpus. Secondly, the words which co-occur with the word Bulgaria are explored using the Mutual Information, T-score and frequencies. On all

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occasions concordance lines, frequent clusters and collocate lists are used to establish semantic prosody in the texts. Keyword lists would elicit recurrent topics which make up the coverage of Bulgaria, while collocates would yield semantic relations sought between the key term Bulgaria and other words.

Pilot Corpora There are two types of auxiliary corpora: for Bulgaria and countries of equal size, and for former communist countries. Types of Keywords Table 4.4 gives the first 30 keywords for four countries for the year 2007. The cut-off point is 10 recurrences in the corpus. Belgium

Denmark

Finland

Bulgaria

1BELGIUM 2BELGIAN 3BELGIUM'S 4FLEMISH 5LETERME 6VERHOFSTADT 7FOURNIRET 8SPEAKING 9BRUSSELS 10DUTCH 11EU 12FRENCH 13EUTHANASIA 14WALLONIA 15BELGIANS 16FLANDERS 17EUROSTAR 18LETERME'S 19FOURNIRET'S 20TRABELSI 21WALLOONS 22COALITION 23MR 24YVES 25FRANCE 26MEZIERES 27DEMOCRATS 28AGED 29BENALLAL 30MONIQUE

1DANISH 2DENMARK 3DENMARK'S 4RASMUSSEN 5POLE 6CARTOONS 7EU 8MUHAMMAD 9WEBSITE 10COPENHAGEN 11FOGH 12ANDERS 13WEDDING 14WILDERS 15DANES 16ARCTIC 17MUSLIM 18PROPHET 19FACEBOOK 20MUSLIMS 21ASYLUM 22SEABED 23ROSKILDE 24BBC 25SHIP 26QUEEN 27TURBINES 28SEA 29NORTH 30VIKING

1FINLAND 2SCHOOL 3FINNISH 4AUVINEN 5ALCOHOL 6JOKELA 7GUN 8SHOOTING 9TUUSULA 10GUNMAN 11GUNS 12CHILDREN 13HELSINKI 14PIPELINE 15EU 16PEKKA 17VANHANEN 18POLICE 19MATTI 20FINLAND'S 21DRINKING 22EDUCATION 23YOUTUBE 24NORD 25UK 26PARENTS 27SWEDEN 28WEBSITE 29YEAR 30PISA

1BULGARIA 2EU 3BULGARIAN 4MEDICS 5LIBYA 6LIBYAN 7KOSOVO 8BULGARIA'S 9SARKOZY 10SOFIA 11HIV 12LIBYA'S 13PARVANOV 14SERBIA 15PALESTINIAN 16EUROS 17INFECTING 18CHILDREN 19CROATIA 20DOCTOR 21INFECTED 22NURSES 23TRIPOLI 24VALCHEVA 25HARRY 26SENTENCES 27NABUCCO 28GEORGIEV 29BBC 30BENGHAZI

Table 4.4. Supplementary corpora for the year 2010.

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As predicted, the keyword lists include proper names, nationality names, toponyms and common nouns. To establish the significance of each category, firstly the lists for each category is established. Table 4.5 shows the place names for the four countries in the auxiliary corpora. The number indicates the rank place in the key word list. The final row calculates the number of foreign place names for each country. Denmark

Belgium

Finland

Bulgaria

2DENMARK 3DENMARK'S 7EU 10COPENHAGEN 16ARCTIC 23ROSKILDE

1BELGIUM 3BELGIUM'S 9BRUSSELS 11EU 14WALLONIA 16FLANDERS 21WALLOONS 25FRANCE

1FINLAND 6JOKELA 9TUUSULA 13HELSINKI 15EU 20FINLAND'S 25UK 27SWEDEN 30PISA

1BULGARIA 2EU 5LIBYA 7KOSOVO 8BULGARIA'S 10SOFIA 12LIBYA'S 14SERBIA 19CROATIA 23TRIPOLI 30BENGHAZI

1

1

3

7

Foreign names

Table 4.5. Place names for 3 countries 2007 The nouns that occur include the name of the country, the name in the possessive, the capital and towns in the country related with different events. It is obvious that EU is in all key word lists. Inasmuch as all the countries are part of the EU, this makes it relevant to the location envisaged with the country name and will not be considered foreign. The other place names include 1 foreign place for Denmark and Belgium, 3 – for Finland. For Bulgaria the number of foreign locations exceeds the number for the other countries more than twice - 7. Two of the toponyms outnumber the possessive form of Bulgaria. This should be an indication that Bulgaria is of little significance in itself without involvement in international happenings. The situation of foreign names is marginal for Finland – it is in-between the old EU members and the newest accession. The status of the abbreviation EU in the four corpora is presented in Table 4.6, which gives the collocates of EU in the four auxiliary corpora. Finland Countries Member states Legislation

Belgium Countries Member states Official

Denmark Member states Leaders Opt-outs

Table 4.6. Collocates of EU for four countries 2007.

Bulgaria Join, joining, joined Aid Requirements

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Belgium includes the phrase “EU official” as the seat of several EU institutions. In the corpus for Denmark the coinage “opt-out” is introduced in connection with discussions of procedures to leave the Union. For Finland the collocate “legislation” reflects a discussion about gun laws, a topical issue for the country. The Bulgarian corpus highlights issues of the recent accession by the association with the verb “join” in various forms. The association with aid is in connection with threats to suspend EU aid if conditions are not met by Bulgaria. As the home of the BBC, the UK can be expected in the corpora for the countries in this study, seeking links with the respective countries. In the corpus for Finland UK comes as a keyword because of comparisons of the educational systems, gun laws and school holidays. However, it cannot be found in the keyword lists for the other countries. The situation with nationality adjectives is as shown in table 4.7. Denmark 1DANISH 15DANES 30VIKING

Belgium 2BELGIAN 4FLEMISH 10DUTCH 12FRENCH 15BELGIANS

Finland 3FINNISH

Bulgaria 3BULGARIAN 6LIBYAN 15PALESTINIAN

Table 4.7. Nationality names for four countries 2007. In this category Bulgaria is the only country with two foreign references. An interesting category is connected with the people whose names feature as key words in the corpus. It relates to the parameter who is given the floor to speak in the discourses about the country, but also - to whose actions are featured and who is sympathised with. The proper names in the Danish corpus include the full name of the Prime Minister at the time Anders Fogh Rasmussen in articles about his Facebook initiative for jogging and about discussions of attitudes to Islam. In the second position comes the name of the Prophet Muhammad from news items about cartoons in a Danish magazine that outraged Muslims. The Dutch MP Geert Wilders is another name which finds a place among the keywords in the Danish corpus as the object of the Danish Prime Minister’s condemnation for airing a film criticising Islam. A title rather than a name among the key words is Queen used in the context of the diamond wedding anniversary of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh, related to the Danish Royal House.

128 Denmark 4RASMUSSEN 8MUHAMMAD 14WILDERS 11FOGH 12ANDERS

Chapter Four Belgium 5LETERME 6VERHOFSTADT 7FOURNIRET 18LETERME'S 19FOURNIRET'S 24YVES

Finland 4AUVINEN 16PEKKA 17VANHANEN 19MATTI

Bulgaria 9SARKOZY 13PARVANOV 24VALCHEVA 25HARRY 28 GEORGIEV

Table 4.8. Proper names in the four sub-corpora for 2007. For the Finnish corpus the proper name – keyword is the name of the gunman who opened fire in a school Pekka Auvinen. The name of the Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen is mentioned with statements on the incident. The name of a Gas Company is also among the keywords – NORD. In the Bulgarian corpus the proper name at the top of the key word list is the name of the French President Sarkozy and his wife for their role in trying to release the Bulgarian medics from a Libyan death sentence for allegedly infecting Libyan children with HIV. With initiatives in the same vein the name of the Bulgarian President Parvanov is also among the key words, as are the names of one of the nurses Valcheva and the doctor Gueorgiev. In effect, Georgiev is also the surname of a Bulgarian barman attacked by an English football fan. Both occur in the concordance of the proper name. Another name is Harry – a man BBC undercover reporters hired to traffic children to the UK. The name of the Bulgarian President Parvanov collocates with SAID which means that he is given the floor to speak. The quotations are indirect and reported, rather than verbatim, live reproductions of his words. President Sarkozy also has as a collocate of his name SAID and his words are also reported rather than quoted verbatim, except for one occasion. The higher key-ness probably reflects the fact that his wife is also referred to with this family name. The other people mentioned by name are also given the floor to speak at least once and their words are reported or quoted as direct speech. This is a reason why the names in the keyword lists can be considered an indication that the people are featured as speakers by the medium. The key common nouns in the corpora lead to formulation of the main topics. Table 4.9 summarises topics on the basis of the common nouns.

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Russian pipeline of through Bulgaria

14PIPELINE 24NORD

27NABUCCO

Rank lists about Gas pipeline school success under the North

22EDUCATION

School holidays

12CHILDREN 26PARENTS 29YEAR

29BBC

Under-cover investigation

5ALCOHOL 21DRINKING

20DOCTOR 21INFECTED 22NURSES 26SENTENCES

Trial of Bulgarian Medics in Libya

7GUN 11GUNS

17INFECTING 18CHILDREN

Topics

4MEDICS 11HIV

Laws about gun Alcohol use use

20TRABELSI

School shooting

17EUROSTAR

Topics

ship Using Solar power energy

27TURBINES

13EUTHANASIA

2SCHOOL 8SHOOTING 10GUNMAN 18POLICE 23YOUTUBE

on Traffic problems Al Qaeda operatives

24BBC 25SHIP

28AGED

Bulgaria Common nouns

Mass murderer Legislation arrested euthanasia

21ASYLUM

22COALITION 27DEMOCRATS

Finland Common nouns

Political crisis

13WEDDING 26QUEEN

Belgium Common nouns

Topics

6CARTOONS 17MUSLIM 18PROPHET 20MUSLIMS

Exploration of the Cartoons of the Anniversary of the Handling A historic North Pole Prophet Royal wedding immigrants to the recreated

5POLE 22SEABED 28SEA 29NORTH

Topics

Denmark Common nouns

129

Table 4.9. Common nouns and topics for 2007. It appears that for the countries from “old Europe” Belgium, Denmark and Finland the number of topics covered is slightly bigger than the number of stories covered for Bulgaria: six – for Finland and Denmark, five – for Belgium and four – for Bulgaria. The numeric difference is insignificant, but the variety is striking. Four of the stories about Denmark

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are definitely positive: a royal wedding, exploration of the North Pole, recreation of an ancient ship and solar-power energy. Two of the stories about Finland are definitely positive: achievements in education, school holidays. The stories about Belgium are negative with a positive outcome: a French murderer caught and tried in Belgium, Al Qaeda operatives apprehended by the police, legislation on euthanasia under discussion and traffic solutions sought. Likewise, the longest thread of coverage about Bulgaria is negative with a positive outcome - five Bulgarian nurses sued in Libya for infecting Libyan children with HIV, sentenced to death and then released with the help of the French President at the time. The second story is of fears from a gas pipeline passing through Bulgarian territory, quite similar to the story from Denmark. One story is about the recognition of Kosovo, where the focus is quite outside Bulgaria. The fourth story is markedly negative – a BBC undercover investigation of a child-smuggling ring in Bulgaria. Another parameter is the degree of engagement. For the stories about education and school holidays, Finland is mentioned in comparison with the UK, and on most criteria Finland outdoes the UK and is set as an example to follow in the BBC articles. Likewise, the treatment of immigrants in Denmark and Belgium sounds a tune of association with problems in the UK. The voyage of the Viking ship in the coverage of Denmark is organised by a British University and features the common past of the two countries through the Viking heritage. Likewise, the celebration of the British Royal wedding involves the Danish Royal family as relatives. In terms of transport, problems with Eurostar trains address both British and Belgian passengers. The discussion of euthanasia in Belgium and gun laws in Finland, as well as alcohol consumption in all EU countries - the old EU members, not newly acceded countries like Bulgaria – draws parallels between the UK, Finland, Belgium and Denmark. Bulgaria is a clear outsider to the club, none of the comparative features including it as an example The topics summarised above can be classified according to three criteria: positive-ness, comparative focus, debatable issues in society and criminal action. This is shown in Table 4.10.

Established Methodology Occurrence of foreign place names in top positions in the keyword list is an indication that the interest is not genuinely in the country but in affairs of international status. Foreign nationality adjectives are another indication of a shift in the interest towards non-national stories.

Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies Belgium

Finland

Legislation on euthanasia

Laws about gun use

Bulgaria Positiveness

Denmark Exploration of the North Pole Anniversary of the Royal wedding

131

A historic ship recreated

Comparative focus

Using Solar power energy Handling immigrants to the country

Alcohol use School holidays Rank lists about school success Political crisis Traffic problems

Gas pipeline under the North Sea

Russian pipeline through Bulgaria Recognition of Kosovo

School shooting

Under-cover investigation of child smuggling Trial of Bulgarian Medics in Libya

Criminal action

Al Qaeda operatives arrested in Belgium Mass murderer arrested and sued in Belgium

Debate in society

Cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad

Table 4.10. Topics in the coverage of 4 countries for 2007. The people whose names have a key status tend to be part of the administration of the country or key figures in topical events. It is important to check whether they collocate with verbs for speaking, such as “say”, “said”, “told” etc. This is an indication that they are given the floor to speak. Therefore, we develop a methodology for exploring the image of a country which includes the following steps: 1. Establishing the key word list for a corpus 2. Checking the place names – if foreign ones are available, then the interest in the country hinges on international topics, not on its own significance.

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3. Checking the proper names in the key word list – they indicate who is given the floor to speak, who is projected as an authority. 4. Arranging the keywords in connection with major topics in the texts – concordance lines may be consulted to ascertain the significance of each. 5. Classifying the topics according to the established criteria: positiveness, comparative focus, debatable issues in society and criminal action. This mechanism is applied on one more set of auxiliary corpora. This time corpora are collected for three countries from the former communist bloc: Bulgaria, Romania and Poland. The year is 2010. The key word lists are presented in Table 4.11. Bulgaria 1EU 2ROMA 3BULGARIA 4ROMANIA 5SARKOZY 6FRANCE 7EUROS 8MEP 9BULGARIAN 10EUROPEAN 11MEPS 12BULGARIA'S 13COMMISSION 14EXPULSIONS 15JELEVA 16EU'S 17SAID 18DEPORTATIONS 19FRENCH 20SARKOZY'S 21REDING 22COMMISSIONER 23CAMPS 24RUMIANA 25EUROZONE 26NICOLAS 27PRESIDENT 28MIGRANTS 29DJANKOV 30EURO

Romania 1ROMA 2ROMANIA 3EU 4ROMANIAN 5FRANCE 6SARKOZY 7BULGARIA 8ROMANIA'S 9SAID 10EUROS 11BUCHAREST 12CAMPS 13EXPULSIONS 14REDING 15DEPORTED 16FRENCH 17DEPORTATIONS 18EUROPEAN 19UK 20CEAUSESCU 21NICOLAS 22BASESCU 23GYPSIES 24SARKOZY'S 25ILLEGAL 26LIONS 27BBC 28MISSILE 29SAYS 30BESSON

Poland 1POLAND 2POLISH 3KACZYNSKI 4PRESIDENT 5POLAND'S 6LECH 7CRASH 8KOMOROWSKI 9KATYN 10PLANE 11RUSSIA 12WARSAW 13JAROSLAW 14POLES 15RUSSIAN 16SMOLENSK 17BRONISLAW 18KILLED 19MR 20KRAKOW 21KACZYNSKI'S 22TUSK 23MOURNING 24SAID 25PRESIDENTIAL 26TRAGEDY 27BBC 28MASSACRE 29ZAKAYEV 30IN

Table 4.11. Key word lists for the auxiliary corpora for 2010. The place, nationality and proper names are classified in the Table 4.12.

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BULGARIA Place names 3BULGARIA 12BULGARIA'S 1EU 4ROMANIA 6FRANCE 16EU'S

Nationality names 9BULGARIAN 10EUROPEAN

Proper names

2ROMA 19FRENCH

Common nouns 17SAID

General

5SARKOZY 20SARKOZY'S 21REDING 26NICOLAS

7EUROS 14EXPULSIONS 18DEPORTATIONS 23CAMPS 27PRESIDENT 28MIGRANTS 30EURO

Roma deportations

15JELEVA 24RUMIANA

13COMMISSION 22COMMISSIONER 8MEP 11MEPS

EUCommissioner

29DJANKOV

25EUROZONE

EU CRISIS (one article

ROMANIA Place names 2ROMANIA 3EU 8ROMANIA'S 11 BUCHAREST 18EUROPEAN 19UK 5FRANCE 7BULGARIA

Nationality names 4ROMANIAN

Proper names

Common nouns

22BASESCU

9SAID 27BBC 29SAYS

1ROMA 16FRENCH

6SARKOZY 14REDING 21NICOLAS 24SARKOZY'S 30BESSON

10EUROS 12CAMPS 13EXPULSIONS 15DEPORTED 17DEPORTATIONS 23GYPSIES 25ILLEGAL 20CEAUSESCU

Roma deportations

26LIONS

Saving animals from poor conditions in Romania Defence system built in Romania

28MISSILE

Topics

CEAUSESCU’s grave

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POLAND Place names 1POLAND 5POLAND'S 12WARSAW 9KATYN 11RUSSIA 16SMOLENSK 20KRAKOW

Nationality names 2POLISH 14POLES

Proper names

15RUSSIAN

3KACZYNSKI 6LECH 8KOMOROWSKI 13JAROSLAW 17BRONISLAW 21KACZYNSKI'S 22TUSK

Common nouns

Topics

19MR 24SAID 27BBC

29ZAKAYEV

4PRESIDENT 7CRASH 10PLANE 18KILLED 23MOURNING 25PRESIDENTIAL 26TRAGEDY 28MASSACRE

Deadly crash of a presidential plane

International Police operation against a criminal

Table 4.12. Key words from the auxiliary corpora for 2010 classified. Obviously the coverage of the three countries is dominated by a long thread of stories – for Bulgaria and Romania this is the expulsion of Roma immigrants from France back to their native countries Bulgaria and Romania; for Poland this is the crash of a Presidential plane and the tragic death of high-ranking officials, including the Polish President. For Romania and Bulgaria the foreign place name which figures as a keyword is France, while the nationality name is Roma. For Poland the place names are Russia and Katyn and Russia – where the plane was headed; the nationality name is Russian. The occurrence of proper names shows that for Poland Polish names dominate the key-word list, but the coverage of Bulgaria and Romania is topped by the name of the French president at the time Nicholas Sarkozy, the EU commissionaire Reding and the French Immigration Minister Eric Besson. However, the Romanian president Basescu also appears in the keyword list, as well as the Bulgarian candidate for EU commissionaire Rumiana Jeleva and the Bulgarian Finance Minister Djankov. The fact that foreign place and proper names occur as key words in the coverage of a country is confirmed by the second set of auxiliary corpora. The tendency, however, is that proportionally to the degree of EU integration – as is the case with Poland and Finland – the number of foreign names decreases.

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Main Study Between 2012 and 2007 the search engine of the BBC website returns 658 items, excluding the sports section. When accidental mentions are removed, 352 items are left.

Key Words The mechanism established above is applied to the material, following the steps. 1. Establishing the key word list for the corpus Below are the first 20 items on the KW list: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

BULGARIA EU BULGARIAN ROMANIA ROMA BULGARIA'S EUROPEAN CORRUPTION COUNTRIES SOFIA SHIELDS MEDICS ROMANIAN EUROS UK BULGARIANS ROMANIANS ACCESSION LIBYA LIBYAN

These key words can be classified according to the criteria established here in Table 4.13:

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136 Place names 1 BULGARIA 2EU 4ROMANIA 6BULGARIA'S 10SOFIA 15UK 19LIBYA

Nationality names 3BULGARIAN 5ROMA 7EUROPEAN 13ROMANIAN 16 BULGARIANS 17 ROMANIANS 20LIBYAN

Proper names 11SHIELDS

Common nouns 8CORRUPTION 9COUNTRIES 12MEDICS 14EUROS 18ACCESSION

Table 4.13. Key words for the 5-year corpus 2. Checking the place names – if foreign ones are available, then the interest in the country hinges on international topics, not on its own significance. Foreign place names are available: Romania, Libya and UK. Romania has a higher key status than the possessive form of Bulgaria. According to the trial mechanism, we can conclude that Bulgaria is not of interest in itself but in relations with others. 3. Checking the proper names in the key word list – they indicate who is given the floor to speak, who is projected as an authority. The proper name with a key status is the name of the English football fan Michael Shields accused of killing a Bulgarian man and doing time in a Bulgarian prison. The major interest is in an UK national serving a sentence in Bulgaria. 4. Arranging the keywords in connection with major topics in the texts – concordance lines may be consulted to ascertain the significance of each. Common nouns 8 CORRUPTION 9 COUNTRIES 12 MEDICS 14 EUROS 18 ACCESSION The keyword “corruption” occurs in texts about the relations between the EU and Bulgaria. Below are the clusters between 5 and 8 words long, occurring more than 5 times arranged according to their frequency:

Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies N 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

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Cluster AGAINST CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION AND IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION AND FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED HIGH LEVEL CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED AND THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION THIS IS SOME OTHER CORRUPTION PROGRESS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED PROGRESS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION AND PROGRESS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CORRUPTION PROGRESS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST LEVEL CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME HIGH LEVEL CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME CORRUPTION THIS IS SOME OTHER CORRUPTION CORRUPTION THIS IS SOME OTHER CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME A CONCERNS ABOUT CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME CONCERNS ABOUT CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED ABOUT CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME TO FIGHT CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME TO FIGHT CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED TO CRACK DOWN ON CORRUPTION THE FIGHT AGAINST HIGH LEVEL CORRUPTION THE FIGHT AGAINST HIGH LEVEL SPECIAL CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME ON BULGARIA AND SPECIAL CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME ON BULGARIA SPECIAL CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME ON ORGANISED CRIME AND CORRUPTION AND OF CONCERNS ABOUT CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME OF CONCERNS ABOUT CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED OF CONCERNS ABOUT CORRUPTION AND MONITORING SCHEME ON BULGARIA AND IMPOSED A SPECIAL CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME ON BULGARIA IMPOSED A SPECIAL CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME ON IMPOSED A SPECIAL CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME IMPOSED A SPECIAL CORRUPTION MONITORING FIGHT CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME FIGHT AGAINST HIGH LEVEL CORRUPTION CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME ON BULGARIA AND CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME ON BULGARIA CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME THE BECAUSE OF CONCERNS ABOUT CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME BECAUSE OF CONCERNS ABOUT CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED BECAUSE OF CONCERNS ABOUT CORRUPTION AND BECAUSE OF CONCERNS ABOUT CORRUPTION A SPECIAL CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME ON BULGARIA AND A SPECIAL CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME ON BULGARIA A SPECIAL CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME ON A SPECIAL CORRUPTION MONITORING SCHEME

The themes that transpire are: intolerance to corruption relayed with the phrase “fight against” or the verbal phrase “to fight against”, reiterated through the synonym “battle”. It also transpires that there is “a corruption monitoring scheme” because the “concern about corruption” persists in

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EU organs. What is of interest is “high level corruption”. It is often associated with “organised crime” and “fraud”. The articles concern different topics but the theme resurfaces with permanent pungency. It is obvious that the concern does not abate within the range of the current study. The collocates of CORRUPTION are as follows (the function words have been removed): 1 7 9 12 13 14 16 22 24 27 29 36 37 44 45 47 49 50 51 52 54 58 59 60 62 63

CORRUPTION CRIME ORGANISED FIGHT LEVEL BULGARIA HIGH TACKLE FIGHTING ANTI PROGRESS ROMANIA PROBLEM WIDESPREAD MEASURES TACKLING EFFORTS REFORM CONCERNS REMAINS CONCERN JUDICIAL EU ALLEGATIONS MONEY COUNTRY

The dominant semantic field is of the words FIGHT, TACKLE, FIGHTING, ANTI, MEASURES, TACKLING, EFFORTS, REFORM, suggesting institutionalised battle with corruption. A lemma which is amply represented in the list of collocates is that of CONCERN – in both singular and plural. A dominant verb is used in the third person singular – REMAINS. The keyword COUNTRIES is too general to relate to one topic only. The clusters are as follows:

Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies N 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

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Cluster Freq. COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED THE EU IN 12 COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED THE EU 12 WHICH JOINED THE EU IN 12 COUNTRIES JOINED THE EU IN 9 FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES 9 FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED 9 WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION 9 WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES 9 COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED THE EU 8 FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED THE 8 FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED THE EU 8 COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED THE EU IN 8 EIGHT FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH 8 EIGHT FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED 8 FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED THE EU IN 8 COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED THE 8 EIGHT FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED THE EU 7 EIGHT FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED THE 7 WAS ONE OF THE THREE COUNTRIES 6 THE EIGHT FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH 6 THE EIGHT FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES 6 THE EIGHT FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED 6 WAS ONE OF THE THREE COUNTRIES ALONG 6 ONE OF THE THREE COUNTRIES ALONG 6 ONE OF THE THREE COUNTRIES 6 WAS ONE OF THE THREE COUNTRIES ALONG WITH 6 ONE OF THE THREE COUNTRIES ALONG WITH 6 THE THREE COUNTRIES ALONG WITH 6 COUNTRIES SOME OF THE COUNTRIES 6 EUROPEAN COUNTRIES SOME OF THE 6 EUROPEAN COUNTRIES SOME OF THE COUNTRIES WHICH 6 EUROPEAN COUNTRIES SOME OF THE COUNTRIES 6 SOME OF THE COUNTRIES WHICH 6 WAS ONE OF THE THREE 6 COUNTRIES SOME OF THE COUNTRIES WHICH 6 OF THE THREE COUNTRIES ALONG 6 OF THE THREE COUNTRIES ALONG WITH 6 THE EIGHT FORMER COMMUNIST COUNTRIES WHICH JOINED THE 5 COUNTRIES THAT JOINED IN 2004 5

The reason for the key status of this word is an attempt to name different groups of countries in the EU. This is done in relation to the rules for admitting workers to the labour market of what is effect the old EU countries. As can be seen from the clusters, there are nominations “the 2004 accession countries” and “2007 accession countries”. There is also the cluster “former communist countries”. On the other hand we have “the three countries” which allowed unlimited access to their labour market to the newly acceded countries. The collocate list includes the following words 1 6 9 10 11 12 17 19

COUNTRIES EU OTHER BOTH TWO WORKERS JOINED EUROPEAN

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27 28 29 31 33 35 36 37 38 43 44 47 50 53 56

NEW 2004 COMMUNIST EIGHT THREE JOIN ONE FORMER UK ACCESSION ALL BULGARIA WORK PROGRESS BALKAN

The semantic field of membership in the EU is outlined with the words JOIN, ACCESSION, NEW. A second field can be identified with the words WORK, WORKER, highlighting the fact that what is under discussion are labour relationships in the EU. A lot of words relate to quantification. A particular status is given to the word BOTH, linked to ROMANIA, which reinforces the observation that Bulgaria is not discussed in its own right, but in tandem with Romania. The keyword MEDICS relates to the thread of stories about 5 Bulgarian nurses, one Bulgarian and one Palestinian doctor accused of infecting Libyan children with HIV. The story persists over the years, although the year 2008 saw the end of the judicial saga. The key clusters are: N 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Cluster OF THE MEDICS SENTENCED TO DEATH THE MEDICS WERE THE MEDICS TO THE RELEASE OF MEDICS SENTENCED TO THE INFECTIONS STARTED MEDICS ARRIVED AT THE MEDICS ARRIVED THE HOSPITAL AND STARTED BEFORE THE INFECTIONS STARTED BEFORE

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This set of expressions recurring in the coverage reinforces the idea that a stable motif in the coverage is the fact that the HIV infections had started even before the Bulgarians arrived in the Libyan hospital. Therefore, a markedly positive attitude is evidenced with this highly prominent story. The major collocates, excluding the function words are these: 2 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 17 18 19 20 21 24 26 27 29 31 33

MEDICS RELEASE SIX LIBYA BULGARIAN BULGARIA DEATH RETURN SENTENCED SECOND INFECTING 2007 CONVICTED LIBYAN FOREIGN SECURE LIBYA'S RETRIAL CHILDREN

A dominant semantic field is the judicial line – CONVICTION, SENTENCED, RETRIAL, DEATH. A second field is dominated by RELEASE, RETURN and SECURE. A major adjective is FOREIGN, emphasising the fact of otherisation of the victims. The keyword EUROS does not also relate to one single story in the coverage of Bulgaria. It occurs in the following clusters:

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Cluster Freq. HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF EUROS 6 WORTH HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF EUROS 5 WORTH HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF 5 EUROS 249 PLUS 100 EUROS 4 EUROS 249 PLUS 100 EUROS FOR 4 300 EUROS 249 PLUS 100 4 300 EUROS 249 PLUS 100 EUROS 4 249 PLUS 100 EUROS FOR 4 300 EUROS 249 PLUS 100 EUROS FOR 4 COMMISSION SUSPENDED ABOUT 500M EUROS 3 EUROS FOR EACH CHILD THE 3

The lower frequencies relate to the story of repatriating Roma immigrants back to Bulgaria and Romania. The higher frequencies present language that is emotional, not factual because of the use of the plural “hundreds of millions of Euros”. The reference is to money Bulgaria stands to lose in aid from the EU if amendments to the legal system in Bulgaria are not made. The list of lexical collocates is this: 1 9 12 16 22 24 28

EUROS WORTH MILLIONS EU BULGARIA AID HUNDREDS

The use of “millions” and “hundreds” in the plural reveals broad generalisations made on the topic. The strong collocation with AID exposes the purpose of the money – namely, EU assistance. The keyword ACCESSION relates to the keyword COUNTRIES, inasmuch as it forms part of the phrase “2004 accession countries”, which is visible from the clusters for the keyword:

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Cluster Freq. WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES 9 WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION 9 FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES 9 FOR WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES 6 FOR WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION 6 FOR WORKERS FROM THE 2004 6 WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES THAT MOVE 3 WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES THAT 3 WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES LUXEMBOURG SIMPLIFIED 3 WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES LUXEMBOURG 3 WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES FOR WORKERS 3 WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES FOR 3 TWO YEARS AFTER THEIR ACCESSION 3 TO WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES THAT 3 TO WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION COUNTRIES 3 TO WORKERS FROM THE 2004 ACCESSION 3 TO WORKERS FROM THE 2004 3

The collocates are: 1 6 8 10 13 17 20 21

ACCESSION TREATY EU COUNTRIES BULGARIA ROMANIA WORKERS ROMANIA'S

The relation between Bulgaria and Romania is shown through this list to stem into the EU accession of the two countries. The word WORKERS signals the significance of labour movement for the accession theme in the coverage. Frequent reference is made of the accession treaty. The discussion of the keywords for the 4-year corpus shows that one of the words clearly relates to one story – that of the Bulgarian medics sentenced to death in Libya. The others highlight themes running through several stories, rather than events from the coverage. 5. Classifying the topics according to the established criteria: positiveness, comparative focus, debatable issues in society and criminal action.

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8 CORRUPTION This can be nothing but a negative topic. The comparison with other countries is that this occurrence is something everyone disapproves of and all countries converge to uproot and monitor the process in Bulgaria. 9 COUNTRIES The split between European countries according to their date of accession is accountable for the fact that some countries are granted freedom of movement, while others are required to grant the right. The BBC tries to mask the fact that the former communist bloc countries are treated differently from the others, among other devices, through the nomination 2004 and 2007 accession countries. The co-existence of the two terms of reference with ‘communist’, however, confirms the fact of such a distinction. 12 MEDICS The everlasting validity of Galtung and Ruge’s classification is reinforced by the fact that the persisting dominance of the story of the Bulgarian medics sentenced to death in Libya, because that story satisfies 7 out of the 12 criteria there. It also corroborates the truth that Bulgaria – as a small, backward and poor country can never vie for international attention unless it satisfies a maximum number of criteria there. 14 EUROS This topic amounts to the fact that Bulgaria depends heavily on aid from the EU and losing this aid may be very damaging for the country. Being a topic linking Bulgaria to other countries, it is also a humiliating issue. 18 ACCESSION Accession to the EU has been a significant fact for Bulgaria, while posing many questions as well. The compatibility of the country – in legal terms, as well as in other terms is an interesting point. The BBC seems to have struck sensitive issues for Bulgaria. But what is lacking is a sympathetic point of view.

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As can be seen, except for Bulgaria, Bulgarian and EU, the keywords differ significantly throughout the years. This means that the about-ness of the stories is different. As was established for the keywords from the corpus for the 4 years, none of the key terms refers to one single story. While smaller, one-year corpora reflect stories, bigger corpora showcase themes running through the coverage of a country. For Bulgaria we establish a heavy dependence on internationalisation of the newsworthy stories through the abundance of foreign names and a particular linkage with Romania. The talking people are foreigners while Bulgarians are given the floor on rare occasions. The preferred themes are corruption, financial aid and EU sanctions. Through the terms of reference “2007 accession countries” and “former communist countries” Bulgaria is relegated to an underprivileged position in the EU. No balance has been sought with positive stories, even keywords of positive meanings lead to stories of negative meaning. The degree of engagement shows very little interplay between Bulgaria and the UK – no associative links are sought, no parallels are drawn, no stories seek out common moral values.

Collocates The calculation of the co-occurrence of words in the corpus provides a different perspective on the material. Firstly, the collocates of Bulgaria, according to the number of texts they are located in show which words are used together with the place name in a big number of articles. This parameter reveals a link persisting through the years. These collocates can be seen in Table 4.14. Excluding the function words, which always tend to dominate such rank lists, we can see that throughout 98 texts – nearly one in three articles in the corpus – Bulgaria co-occurs with Romania. Further down the list we find two more Balkan countries – Turkey and Greece. The adjective NEIGHBOURING also indicates a regional focus in the coverage of Bulgaria. This corroborates the finding that BBC writes about Bulgaria in tandem with Romania and concerning regional problems of the Balkans. JOINING and ACCESSION also feature in a great number of articles. This reflects the fact of Bulgaria’s recent accession to the EU. More indicative of semantic prosody is the joint occurrence of the adjectives URGENT and POOREST, which collocate with Bulgaria in seven articles. Therefore, we can say that associating Bulgaria with poverty of the highest order is a stable feature of the representation of Bulgaria, as well as highlighting the urgency of the matters.

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The paraameter which guarantees th hat the co-occuurrence of two o items is independentt of the vagaries of a corp pus is the T--score. It is invariably dominated bby function words w and the appearance o f content worrds points to a high ddegree of ceertainty of th he bonding bbetween the two. t The collocates of BULGARIA A classified acccording to theeir T score caan be seen in Table 4.15.

Table 4.14. Collocates off Bulgaria by y number of ttexts.

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Table 4.15. Collocates off BULGARIA A by T score..

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The scorre of 2.59 forr POOREST and a 2.60 for U URGENT con nfirm the significancee of the assocciation betweeen Bulgaria and these tw wo highly negative quaalities. The asssociation with h Romania – 116,23 – is also o high, as is for Turkeey and Greecce. ACCESSIION is a dom minant concep pt, as are JOINING inn various form ms. The paraameter whichh highlights collocations am mong lexical words is Mutual Infoormation. The list of words can be seen iin Table 4.16 arranged according too their MI scorre.

Table 4.16. MI score forr collocates off Bulgaria. The adjeectives URGE ENT and POO OREST featurre with a high h score in this table ass well. The cooncept of poverty is reinforrced by the sttatus of a second mem mber of the sam me lemma – POORER. P

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The adjeective URGE ENT collocatees with ACT TION and thee concept evoked are measures agaainst crime an nd corruption demanded off Bulgaria by the EU.

pped by the aadjective WO OULD-BE Rather uunexpectedly the list is top and the nounn ALLIES. As can bbe seen from the t concordan nce lines, ALL LIES is establiished as a collocate too Bulgaria wiith articles ab bout the unreest in the Mid ddle East reminding oof the incidentt with the Bullgarian nursess sentenced to o death in Libya. This is the sentencce recurring in n 5 articles: Bulgaria, itss allies in the EU, and the United U States ssay Libya hass used the case to defleect criticism from fr its run-do own health serrvice. Other refferences are available a as weell:

More offten than not the adjective WOULD-BE E occurs in th he phrase “One of Buulgaria's would-be Commisssioners” in sstories about the t failed election of EU Commisssioner from Bulgaria. H Her name JEL LEVA is another worrd with a higgh MI score for Bulgariaa. She rather than the successful ccandidate Krisstalina Georgiieva associatees with Bulgaaria in the

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BBC coveraage. The phraase “an exodu us of would-bbe economic migrants” m also featurees in the conncordance lin nes for this item. It is relatively infrequent bbut with a highh MI score beecause of the specificity off the lowfrequency phhrase. The worrd BENCHMA ARKS occurs in articles abbout a series of o criteria set to Bulgarria and Romania by the EU U to improve thheir judiciariees.

Great atttention is given to this EU U initiative – sseveral articlees discuss the measurees, compare them for Bu ulgaria and R Romania, varrious EU officials aree given the flloor to speak k out about thhem. Interestiingly, the respective kkeyword lists give no ind dication of thhe significancce of this concept in thhe corpus. A big ppart of the lem mma of the word w JOIN ooccurs as bon nded with Bulgaria. Frrequent collocates are: EU U; 2007 – thee year when Bulgaria joined the E EU; ROMAN NIA – the cou untry Bulgariaa joined togetther with. The collocaate SCHENGE EN features distant d plans, as well as th he phrase THE EURO O ZONE. Paraallels are draw wn with other country’s pro ospects to join the EU U – Turkey and Croatiaa. The past pparticiple JO OINED is instrumentall in phrases which w draw a distinction between the countries which joinedd the EU in 2007 and in 20 004. The preseent participle describes problems annd perspectivees – a joining date, d worth joiining etc. It is onlyy natural thatt the media write w about roows and not surprising s that BULGA ARIA has a high h MI score with ROW. IIn effect, thiss is partly due to the rrecurring storry of the Bullgarian mediccs sentenced in Libya, where the w word is used in i a different meaning: “Thhe five Bulgaarians and one Palestinnian doctor arre on death row r in Tripolli”. Yet, severral actual rows are nam med with the other occurreences: the exppatriation of Bulgarian B Roma peoplle from Francce, the discov very that som me Bulgarian diplomats d have been sppies, a row abbout gas supp plies from Russsia through Ukrainian U territory, prooperty rows with w Slovenia and a Italy etc.

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The worrd WATCHIN NG collocates with Bulgariaa in a series of o articles about an Ennglish footballl fan that cam me to Bulgariaa to watch a match m and tried to kill a Bulgarian barman. b The fan f was sentennced and did time in a Bulgarian pprison. The recurrence of th his word show ws the emphaasis BBC placed on thhe innocent acctivities plann ned by the fann and the de-emphasis of the crimee. The worrd INTEGRA ATE features in the clusterr “Bulgaria's tentative efforts to inntegrate its Turkish T and Roma (Gypssy) minoritiess”, which comes in rellation with racce riots in the country in 20010. The usee of the wordd PARDON associates w with two storiies – the Bulgarian nuurses pardoneed by the Bulg garian Presideent after being g released from a Libyan jail and seeeking a pardon n for the Engllish fan who attacked a a Bulgarian baarman. The worrd WORSE feaatures in the stories s about thhe English foo otball fan sentenced inn Bulgaria, whose w family describe the experience as a ‘worse than a nighttmare’. A lenggthy discussio on is dedicateed to the issuee whether corruption inn Bulgaria is worse w than in any EU counntry. In connecction with Bulgarian im mmigrants, WORSE W relatees to three conncepts – the wages of Bulgarian w workers are woorse than thosee of other natiionalities; picking fruit causes problems in the UK U with the in nsufficient nuumber of work kers from Bulgaria; annd the numbeer of Bulgariaan immigrantss to the UK increases, i which calls for action beffore the situatiion gets worsee. The worrd POPULAT TION is part of statistics qquoting the decreasing population oof Bulgaria, thhe percentage of Gypsies inn it, the high proportion

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of smokers, a high percentage of the sex workers of Bulgarian origin in international locations, as well as a number of neutral data about the size of Bulgaria. The highly positive word HOPES is mainly a verb predicating of EU officials’ hopes that Bulgaria will fulfil the directives and improve its judiciary. The verb ADMITTED reports statements of various officials – mainly EU. Recurrent is Rhen’s statement: “He admitted Europe was suffering from “enlargement blues”. Secondly it is part of the passive phrase ‘was admitted’ in relation to the EU and NATO. Thirdly, immigrant workers from Eastern Europe are admitted to the Western labour market. The word AHEAD is mainly of temporal reference in the corpus – ahead of a conference, ahead of the EU accession, ahead of elections etc. Once we see it as part of a positive comparison in favour of Bulgaria: “Bulgarians were seen to be further ahead in the accession process and were worried about the Romanians holding them back” The name SERGEI relates to the Bulgarian Prime Minister and leader of the Socialist party. A frequent collocate is SAID, indicating that his statements are quoted by the BBC. With reference to the stories they come from, we can arrange the collocates into the thematic groups shown in Table 4.17. The largest group are words related with partnership issues. Significantly, the association is that Bulgaria was admitted – as the object of an action performed by others. Integration is a process that is not completed yet and remains a matter of hopes. A candidate for EU commissioner remained “would-be”, while the alliance with the EU helped save Bulgarians from a trumped-up legal trial. The issue of poverty looms large with two collocates – the comparative and superlative forms of the adjective POOR. The need for improvement is projected with the words BENCHMARKS and URGENT. Likewise, the issue of regional relations is presented with three collocates of high MI score, including Romania, Greece and the adjective neighbouring. The story of the English football fan sentenced in Bulgaria provides another group of collocates. Obviously the Bulgarian Socialist party features high in the associative list, as the one that ruled throughout a big part of the researched period. It is obvious that the information about co-occurring items is different from that about key words in the corpus. When put together, we can see that the image created for Bulgaria includes topics of corruption and

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crime, admission problems in the EU. The quality associated with Bulgaria is poverty. It also seems that the BBC published stories demanding improvement from Bulgaria. Positivity is not found and the interest is in connection with regional issues or UK nationals visiting Bulgaria. A reasonable requirement would be that international media keep track of the image they create of a country with their coverage and look for more balance, unless they deliberately mean to foster negative attitudes to the country in their audiences. Poverty

POOREST POORER

Improvements needed

URGENT BENCHMARKS

Membership issues

JOINING JOINS JOIN JOINED WOULD-BE ALLIES INTEGRATE HOPES ADMITTED JELEVA

Regional issues

ROMANIA NEIGHBOURING GREECE

UK citizen sentenced in Bulgaria

WATCHING PARDON WORSE

The Bulgarian Government

SERGEI SOCIALIST

Single items

ROW POPULATION AHEAD

Table 4.17. Thematic groups of collocates

CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSIONS

Answers to the Research Questions In this chapter we revisit the research questions set at the start of the project and explore the answers established with the research. 1. Explore the quantity of material published about Bulgaria. Is it equal to that about other countries, does it follow the same agenda as that for other countries, are topics hidden from the audience and are others imposed by the medium? Tables 5.1 and 5.2 repeat summarised data about the corpora. Bulgaria 72 25 47

Belgium 93 35 58

Finland 73 46 27

Portugal 209 152 57

Denmark 125 71 54

2007 altogether Sport News

Table 5.1. Articles about five countries of a similar size on the BBC website for the year 2007 Poland 261

Romania 123

Bulgaria 62

2010 News

Table 5.2. Articles about three former communist countries on the BBC website for the year 2010. The answer to the question whether the BBC published fewer articles about Bulgaria than about the other countries in this study is in the positive. In absolute terms, fewer articles are published about Bulgaria, although the articles about Finland in 2007 were found to be even fewer than those about Bulgaria. The materials about the other countries of a

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similar size outnumber those about Bulgaria by about 20%. For 2010 the number of articles about Romania is double the amount for Bulgaria, and for Poland there is three times as much. Smaller coverage is a trend for all the years in this research. The number of articles about Bulgaria tends to be smaller than that about countries from Western European countries and smaller than those about Eastern European countries. Bulgaria is underrepresented as a former communist country and as a small country. The tendency to focus on crime fluctuates over the years – while for 2007 the Bulgarian crime stories outnumber those for Belgium, for 2010 the trend is reversed: more crime is covered for Belgium than about Bulgaria. We concluded that the coverage of crime is a parameter dictated by actual events in life and not by a tendency to seek out negative stories. However, it does appear that crime stories are associated with the coverage of immigration from the former communist countries to the UK. Conversely, when English people visit other countries, crime stories connected with them are also actively covered. Thus it would appear that the coverage of crime is, in effect, an interest in the fate of one’s fellow countrymen rather than a sick obsession to draw out negativity where it does not occur. A stable tendency to steer clear of social topics looms large when covering Bulgaria in comparison to the other countries selected for this research. For two of the years for this study no social stories were published at all. Later on, when such stories appear, they project a poor, peasant society. Thus a stereotypical picture is created, which does not benefit the image of Bulgaria. An active interest in Bulgarian society and a wider picture – outside the poor villages - would present the country in a much fairer way. The range of stories about Bulgaria is established to be narrow. For each of the years explored with this research the coverage is dominated by two big stories, which take the lion share of the attention, with three or four smaller themes and the pie charts for Bulgaria look split into two almost equal halves. Quite unlike that, the other countries are covered with a variety of rubrics. Maybe international standards can be set for this parameter and balances need to be sought in view of providing a broader picture. The coding category ‘providing occasion for publishing an article’ revealed that the stories about Bulgaria are prompted by statements, and less often by events. Sometimes coverage is induced by the medium as undercover investigations about unpleasant aspects of life. Such a readiness to seek out occasions for undercover investigations is a clear sign of the negative perceptions of a country. The tendency to cover

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statements is one more indication that life in Bulgaria is not tracked by the medium, but the coverage echoes the words of others. As for missed stories, in comparison with the coverage of the Bulgarian National Television, the BBC only selected for coverage the top news item, which projects 7 out of 12 news values in Galtung and Ruge’s classification (1965). The rest of the news – negative in nature - was neglected. Reuters, for their part, managed to cover 12 positive stories from Bulgaria, neither of which found a place in the BBC coverage for the same period. This led us to conclude that crime is not sought out as a topic, but positivity is not, either. The analysis of the degrees of engagement between the countries featured in the BBC coverage elicited that Bulgaria occurs in the following categories: crime international, people from one country visit the other, EU business, economic issues, international diplomacy, tragic incidents, immigration, government and citizen action. For the category IMMIGRATION Bulgaria differs from the other countries in being a source of immigrants rather than a recipient. Bulgaria never features in the following categories: the two countries are in physical proximity, collaboration between the countries, international events, parallels are drawn with events and evaluations in the other country, a FIRST in a rank list, common past, weird incidents. Physical proximity and common past are non-existent between Bulgaria and the UK. Collaboration between countries does not seem to attract interest even for the other countries in this study, either. It was tentatively suggested that Bulgaria seems to feature in rank lists for negative events, such as low access to the Internet, a high percentage of prostitutes etc. The lack of interest in weird incidents was identified as an indicator that Bulgaria stands outside the interest of the BBC, even for trivial and absurd stories. The reluctance to include Bulgaria in international comparisons, for its part, poses a serious concern that the country is not considered on a par with other European countries. The coding category of “what roles are assigned to Bulgarians in the stories on the BBC website” reveals that a great deal of the articles dedicated to Bulgarians present them as murderers - Bulgarian immigrants offending against UK citizens. The linkage immigration – criminality appears quite significant in the coverage of the other former communist countries. But while for Poland a positive balance is sought, none has been discovered for Bulgaria. This was attributed to the fact that Bulgaria started being a source of immigration later in time than Poland. For Poland the awareness that a balance is needed has risen gradually, while for Bulgaria these are early days.

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As for being given the floor “to speak” in the articles about the country, Bulgarian voices are rarely heard. Often, non-Bulgarian experts are invited to comment on Bulgarian problems. This type of coverage does not allow the country to speak for itself, to express opinions, initiate action etc, which is particularly detrimental to its image. Selecting which rank lists to quote reflects an attitude to a country. The accumulation of negative rank lists topped by the same country does create an image of negativity. Furthermore, a tell-tale sign is employing the country as a benchmark of something. In the case of Bulgaria this is poverty. The attempt to draw out thematic threads from the coverage of 4 countries showed that the topics covered for the former communist countries differ from those for the countries of “old Europe”. The attack points for the communist countries include: (1) immigration, associated with criminality but balanced with a few benefits for the economy of the host country and with the solace that the immigrants are going home; (2) the lessons of WWII crimes are enmeshed with the subtle message that communism was no less anti-Semitic than fascism; (3) animal rights are often violated and Eastern Europeans are unaware of the fact that animals should be taken care of until British people get involved; (4) the countries need to improve their services; (5) relations with the former partner Russia, shown to doubt its ex-allies while they staunchly steer away from the old-times bloc. Whenever aid is mentioned, it is to highlight the noble efforts of the benefactors, leaving aside the presuppositions lurking behind the activities: Romanians are presumed to need Wellington boots obviously, to tread the muddy streets of their country; Bulgarian children need camps for creative activities, apparently because their recreation is dull etc. It is the implications rather than the actual argument that put Bulgaria and Romania in a negative light. A cline of rapprochement between East and West is clearly seen from Poland to Bulgaria. Poland is presented as fully integrated in European practices: in legal and military co-operation, in acceptance of moral values etc. Bulgaria and Romania, for their part, remain fully entrenched in fraudulent practices, crime and corruption which make them unacceptable to the European Union. While Romania is comparable to Western democracies in its brave citizen society struggling against what they see as unjust economic austerity, Bulgaria does not even live up to this standard. While for Poland communism is but a shade from the past, for Bulgaria and Romania the hint does not even exist that they are equal to the other countries in the EU.

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Thematic threads proceed from values considered universal. On the one hand these are human rights – of movement, welfare, freedom to worship and maintain one’s own lifestyles. On the other hand multicultural society is placed in focus, together with its problems. Thirdly, and quite equivocally, attitudes to history make the headlines: veneration of heroic acts and compassion for the suffering of victims of historic atrocities. A cline is observable from Belgium, where the heroes of the past are held in awe, through Poland where a reminder lurks that communism was no less discriminatory than fascism, to Romania where anti-Semitism has already come under criticism as a crime. Bulgaria remains outside this thread. 2. What language is used to speak about Bulgaria – is it construed as an active participant in the discourses, or is it relegated to a circumstantial role? Are there nominative practices – idioms, titles, adjectives – which derogate the country? Are strategies of otherisation employed to the country? Table 5.3 summarises the language features established to shape the writing about Bulgaria on the BBC website.

Lexical enhance the gravity of B’s position

Reifying unmotivated blames Mixing countries indiscriminately Giving a qualification, not describing the process The nominal calls for a verb to moderate its activity

Repeated sums of money Bulgaria may lose organised crime crime and corruption Romania and Bulgaria in reforming their judiciary

grave consequences for the European Union's security

must not delay their integration

2004 admissions and 2007 entrants one of the three countries which chose to apply no restrictions cleanse the administration

Overlexicalisation

Paradoxical nominations

Vague reference

Use of gradable adjectives rather than of taxonomic ones

Nominalisations substitute processes

Relexicalisations

Exclusive nominations

Use of metaphor when prescribing remedial action

The activity is not pinpointed

Presenting the acceptance of B as exceptional

Reinforcing divisions

function otherisation

Example Bulgarians living abroad are called IMMIGRANTS; British people living abroad are EXPATS

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Terms of reference

Conclusions

Pragmatic

Cohesion and coherence

160

Euphemistic presentation of maximal controls

Signalling a negative attitude to free movement

Only minimal border checks are carried out within Schengen, though the treaty requires the member states to apply uniform controls on the EU's external borders BUT free movement of workers is a fundamental right in the EU

Illogical links

Conjunctions reveal developments in a paradoxical relation

To provide a negative contrast

In a separate report, Romania is also expected to face strong criticism, but the European Commission will stop short of sanctions it was “premature” to let them join Bulgaria promised to “do its utmost” need the approval of all 25 Schengen nations to join old Europe – new Europe: the map of movement

unannounced comparative focus

Quotations

Oblique language functions

Sweeping generalisations

Imposing a template to reify roles

To instil the roles of each type

Unachievable task

Impersonal promise

Unmotivated qualifications

Backgrounding, failing to see Bulgaria for what it is worth

Romania and Bulgaria

Unprincipled co-ordination

Prevaricating

We are aware that the political situation in some EU member countries is complicated. For that reason, we will do our utmost to remove any doubts

False logical links

Chapter Five

MAFIA KILLINGS is the title of a passage about misuse of funds for border control and agriculture The article comparing Bulgaria and Romania is written by a Romanian national

Lack of logical links

Authored by a journalist interested in negative presentation of Bulgaria

Last but one paragraph: Diplomats say the strong language of the draft report MAY BE WATERED DOWN by Wednesday

The Netherlands plans to delay until next year any decision on whether to let Bulgaria and Romania join Europe's passport-free Schengen zone Abstract: The report is possibly THE MOST SCATHING EVER WRITTEN BY THE EU EXECUTIVE ABOUT A MEMBER STATE

Ousting Bulgaria out of the focus of the sentence

use of the superlative in the abstract – diminished by weak modality in the last paragraph

their workers STILL face barriers in some European countries.

Conventional implicature

Table 5.3. Language features in the depiction of Bulgaria

Functional Sentence Perspective Genre specific

restrictions on labour movements and explanations for imposing them given in detail

Abundance of detail

Conclusions

The journalist uses Bulgaria as a negative contrast to her own country

Making heady accusations

Increasing the gravity of claims

talk about the decision, not the country

Presented as temporary

Share experience

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The voices heard in the articles come from EU officials, a BBC journalist, the Bulgarian Prime Minister and the spokesperson of the Ministry of the Foreign Affairs. The language of the EU officials is highly formalised, marked by a positivity which conceals the actual negative nature of the statements and avoids conflictive expression. Verbs of mental states dominate to avoid naming direct action. Metaphoric language masks the actual situation and creates a visual representation rather than the factual situation. While Bulgaria is in rhematic positions in the sentence, the thematic positions reveal that what is under discussion is not Bulgaria but other issues – border controls, preventing immigration, preserving the labour market from external pressure etc. The use of passives mostly serves to allow the writer to introduce the doer of the action with an extended phrase at the end of the sentence, in a rhematic position. Co-ordinated phrases such as “crime and corruption”, “organised crime and high-level corruption” are well inculcated in EU jargon. However, the experience construed with such phrases boggles the mind with the paradoxical juxtaposition of entities difficult to reconcile. Moreover, their composition varies: in other corpora a degree of fixedness is shown between graft and corruption, prostitution and crime, etc. Justification to explain the linkage between the respective concepts is unavailable and brandishing them just serves to accuse but not to pinpoint problems. The BBC, for its part, quotes the EU statements between inverted commas in an attempt to be precise in using its sources of information, but also - in a gesture of taking a distance from the positions expressed. Sometimes the qualifications are vague and deprived of substance. When presented without proper connectors, they sound weird and void. In the cases when they are highlighted by making them sub-headings of sections, a certain irony transpires. However, the choice of topics reinforces the image of backwardness – chastisement by EU officials for various offences, talk of mafia etc. Appointing a Romanian to cover Bulgarian topics for the BBC provided her with an occasion to use Bulgaria as a negative contrast for her country; the editors did not purge her article of malicious intent. In the end, this was a one-off article and not a trend. The editorial lack of interest is revealed with the fact that articles quote other agencies, which means that the issues covered were not considered important enough to send a BBC reporter. The impression is that the lack of interest is stronger than the negative attitude. The Bulgarian voices contrast with the Romanian. While the Romanian President is quoted with strong, earnest and unambiguous messages, the

Conclusions

163

Bulgarian officials in this corpus make incoherent statements, “reject allegations”, prevaricate etc. This contrast is extremely damaging for Bulgaria’s image. Nevertheless, the Bulgarian administration probably deserved it. 3. What data are given by extended collections of media texts? What topics or themes are suggested concerning the aboutness of the texts by Key word lists? What collocational associations are made with the term BULGARIA in the corpus? The key word list for the four years suggests that many other countries feature in a corpus of articles about Bulgaria. Because this is not so for the other countries selected for comparisons, we conclude that for Bulgaria there is a heavy dependence on internationalisation of the newsworthy stories, Bulgaria is not of interest outside associations with other countries. A particular linkage with Romania stands out through the high values of keyness and the collocational profile of the country name. Foreign proper names are also available in the key word list. Their high co-incidence with verbs of speaking indicates that they are given the floor to speak in the coverage of Bulgaria. The common nouns in the keyword list indicate that dominant themes in the coverage of Bulgaria through the researched period have been: corruption, financial aid and EU sanctions. The key status of COUNTRY reflects the inculcation of the terms of reference “2007 accession countries’ and ‘former communist countries”, through which Bulgaria is relegated to an underprivileged position in the EU. The keyword lists for individual years indicate stories, not themes. From the stories indicated by the keyword list for 2007, none is positive, none has a comparative focus, and all the stories relate to crime or debatable issues. The list of co-occurring items with the term BULGARIA also reveals a high degree of association with corruption, crime and admission problems in the EU. The quality associated with Bulgaria is poverty. A special semantic field of collocates suggests that the BBC published stories demanding improvement from Bulgaria. Another one indicates that the interest is in connection with regional issues or UK nationals visiting Bulgaria. From the answers to the three types of questions, we can conclude that the interest in Bulgaria is little, the coverage includes a monochrome gamut of themes and the associations made with the country are of poverty, crime, retarded progress and sanctions. The language is

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distanced; Bulgaria is out of focus and indiscriminately bundled together with Romania; when the country is not an affected participant by the deeds of others, it is in the circumstantial fringes of general European arguments, such as border security and freedom of movement. This type of coverage does not give a positive image of Bulgaria. Whether it is fair to represent a country with so scanty indications of sympathy and in such sustained hues of negativity is a question of media ethics. A reasonable requirement would be that such tendencies are monitored and international media are prevented from creating negative images for countries. This can be done by a fairer balance of the topics; an interest in social stories featuring the country in its own right; a readiness to include the country in comparisons with others based on universal interests. Otherwise the media foster negative attitudes to the country in their audiences, even if they think that they are covering actual developments.

Discussion of the Methodology Cross-examining the data Content analysis elicits topics covered about Bulgaria. Corpus techniques – examining the key words – provide a different approach to the same issue. How do the results compare? Table 5.4 presents the results of the content analysis for the topics covered in 2010 about three countries. They are arranged as topics evolved with the coverage. The ones indicated with bold type are the thematic threads, while the others give continuous coverage. An asterisk shows which of the topics appear indicated by key words though corpus analysis.

Conclusions Poland (261) President’s Death (74)* Immigration (44)

Romania (123) Roma deportation (34)*

Elections (24) War memories (24)

inclement weather (9)

Intl Politics (23)*

Immigration (8)

Social life (16)

Britons in Romania (6) Relations with Russia(6)*

Music and Dance (6)

Science (4)

Music and dance(5) Failing Health System(5)

World Cup Bid (4)

Ceausesco’s grave(4)*

Animal welfare (4)

EU criticism(4)

Records (6)

Bulgaria (62) Roma deportations (22)*

animal welfare (11)* Economic news (10) Anti-austerity protests (9)

Disasters (31)

165

EU nominee (11)* EU criticism (8) Visuals (4) Crime (3) elations with Russia (3) Britons in Bulgaria (2) Inclement weather in Europe (2) Sports events (2) Aid from abroad (2)

War memories(3) Aid from abroad(3)

Table 5.4. Content Analysis data compared to Key Words Analysis As can be seen, the key words infallibly indicate long lines of reference to an event, as well as stories associated with very specific names. But important thematic threads can be missed, if only key word analysis is conducted. That is why the two approaches need to be considered as complementary.

Methodological improvements For the analysis of the language we employed the following list of questions formulated by Fairclough (1989) and echoed by many others e.g. (Bloor and Bloor 1995:235): 1. What experiential values do grammatical features have? What type of process and participant dominate? Is agency unclear? Are processes what they seem? Are nominalisations used?

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Are sentences active or passive? Are sentences negative or positive? 2. What relational values do grammatical features have? What modes (declarative, interrogative, imperative) are used? Are there important features of relational modality? Are the pronouns we and you used, and if so, how? 3. What expressive values do grammatical features have? Are there important features of expressive modality? 4. How are simple sentences linked together? What logical connectors are used? Are complex sentences characterised by co-ordination subordination? What means are used for referring inside and outside the text?

or

This checklist was found adequate for the purposes of the present research. With a view of our findings, three more questions can be included: 1. Do passives hide agency, or do they highlight the doer with extended by-phrases? 2. What formulations are preferred for the verbal action, especially after modal verbs? Do they conceal the actually desired actions – to delay Bulgaria’s integration, to restrict free movement of labour? 3. Are the adjectives taxonomic or gradable? If consequences are described as “grave”, rather than “financial”, then the discussion is not serious. Corpus research obviously provides a facilitated procedure for conducting Content Analysis. The procedure developed and tested with this research included the following steps: 1. Establishing the key word list for a corpus 2. Checking the place names – if foreign ones are available, then the interest in the country hinges on international topics, not on its own significance. 3. Checking the proper names in the key word list – they indicate who is given the floor to speak, who is projected as an authority. 4. Arranging the keywords in connection with major topics in the texts – concordance lines may be consulted to ascertain the significance of each.

Conclusions

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5. Classifying the topics according to the established criteria: positiveness, comparative focus, debatable issues in society and criminal action. The application of this procedure revealed that corpora comprising material for one year easily lead into topics of articles. For the 5-year corpus, however, the key words led to themes rather than thematic threads of coverage. This would require to re-formulate point 4 in the list: 4. Arranging the keywords in connection with major themes in the texts – concordance lines may be consulted to ascertain the significance of each.

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Websites Centre for Media Literacy http://www.medialit.org/ The Media Literacy online Project http://mlop.proscenia.net/ Record Europe Brussels, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=CRE&reference =20111012&secondRef=ITEM-015&language=EN&ring=B7-20110532

Corpora LexisNexis, News Bank http://www.crl.edu/focus/article/462 WORD BANKS ONLINE CORPUS http://www.collinslanguage.com/content-solutions/wordbanks