Argumentative Discourse of fear as persuasive strategy: The case of the Sun British tabloid supporting Brexit

Abstract

The United Kingdom electorate chose to vote in favour of leaving the European Union in the so-called Brexit referendum held on 23rd June 2016. This referendum had an exhaustive campaign covered by the media, where most of the national press was divided between either Remain or Leave positions. Amongst the Leave campaign, its major supporters were the Tabloids, which are the newspapers with the major circulation in this country for several decades. This Tesis de Maestría analyses critically the multimodal discourse in 22 news and editorial articles of the British national tabloid The Sun, published online before the Brexit referendum took place. The finality is to find out to what extent the rhetorical discourse of the Sun depicting Brexit in both, news articles and editorial articles, have threatening elements ingrained, as a normalized representation of reality. The results suggest that, The Suns argumentative structures vary in the news and editorial articles of the corpus. However, both present similarities at the ideological level, reinforcing through rhetorical discourse threatening and polarised ideas of self-perception, the perception of the ‘other’; Euroscepticism; antiimmigration; nationalism; and sovereignty. Thus, as a rhetorical strategy to persuade readers to support Leave in the EU Referendum.