Abstract
The race riots of 2001 in some British cities remarked a
considerable lack of inter-ethnic harmony. The violence that
plagued cities like Bradford, Oldham and Burnley was
officially read as symptomatic of the fragility and absence
of common core values. One central norm was the belief in
a common national identity (Britishness). A number of local
and national race-related reports were produced to
champion the hegemonic official discourses that “the
absence of community cohesion is basically the end product
of the absence of a shared British national identity”. Based
on the British cultural critic Stuart Hall’s Reception theory,
this article postulates that an influential news agency like
BBC News Online is expected to decode and then encode
the official discourses of community cohesion and
Britishness in tune with the mainstream version. However,
my critical and interpretative analysis of some electronically
produced articles of BBC yielded some interesting findings.
BBC News Online, despite its “official-ness” did not read
official hegemonic discourse in an absolute preferred way.
There are important nuances in its readings. Such nuances
reveal that audiences (in this study BBC News Online is
treated as an audience to official discourses) are not passive
consumers of hegemonies. They have their own choices and
constraints which shape their decoding of and re-encoding
of their world realities. The basic target of this article is to
show the way BBC News Online reproduced, if any, the
dominant discourses of social cohesion as a guarantee of
Britishness and vice-versa.
Hassen Zriba. (2014) “Readings” of Britishness and community cohesion in BBC News Online during 2001 race riots, Journal of Media Studies, Volume 29, Issue 1.
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