Search

This paper analyses the historic role of Britain's major public service broadcaster, the BBC, in reporting the European Union. To do this it combines a content analysis of two datasets of BBC broadcast and online coverage from 2007 and 2012 with a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with former and current senior BBC editors and journalists. The research finds that BBC coverage in the pre-referendum period was closely tied to major events – such as summits – and elite party conflict. These patterns in coverage were primarily a consequence of the lack of traditional news values inherent in most EU stories and the impact of the wider political and media landscape. The consequence of these patterns in coverage was to present audiences with a restricted, negative and largely conflictual picture of Britain's relationship with the EU which is likely to have fuelled rather than inhibited the growth of Euroscepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional problem-focussed news often cast audiences in passive and reactive ways, which can disempower them from participating in civic life. With influences from positive psychology, solutions journalism (SOJO) is proposed as a way to improve audiences' mental wellbeing and engagement with the news. However, research seldom systematically examines how SOJO psychologically empowers audiences, leaving a gap for a more thorough understanding of the potential of SOJO in fulfilling the democratic role of journalism. Drawing on the theory of psychological empowerment (PE) and through 59 in-depth interviews with members of the public in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we examine UK audience responses to the concept of SOJO. Normatively promising findings emerged from our study. SOJO was considered to be useful in intrapersonal empowerment (i.e., increasing perceived control and self-efficacy), interactional empowerment (i.e., enhancing critical awareness), and behavioural empowerment (i.e., motivating community involvement and coping behaviours). Theoretically, this study establishes a firm connection between SOJO and PE which, we argue, has important implications for journalism's often troubled relationship with civic engagement. As such, we call for a rethinking of the often taken-for-granted problem-focussed news practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]