Euromyths: The Long History of Anti-EU ‘Fake News’ in the British Press

The next speaker at IAMCR 2019 is Imke Henkel, whose focus is on how British news coverage of EU affairs has influenced the outcome of the Brexit referendum in the longer term. She points to the Leave campaigns infamous lie that Britain was sending £350m to the EU every week, which is understood to have played an important role in campaigning, and notes that this is only the latest of a very long history of bizarre stories about purported EU regulations disadvantaging British citizens and businesses.

These stories are what can be understood as Euromyths, representing a second-order semiological system in a Barthesian sense: they follow a particular linguistic structure in order to promote a social wrong. Such myths present a ‘we’ identity group of idealised Britons within which the reporter is also positioned, and the news articles are not written in a standard journalistic form but are full of comical puns and banter in order to recontextualise the news story as an amused conversation between reporter and audience.

This pitches the British against other Europeans and frames them as stronger, harder-working, more independent and exceptional, and more self-reliant, standing up against foolish and ridiculous Eurocrats bullies to protect their own rights.

By contrast, stories that cover such issues from a more journalistic perspective avoid such comical discourse and instead follow more conventional journalistic structures; such articles do not pitch the British against the Europeans, and point to avenues for resolving genuine issues – yet these stories also fail to capture the public imagination and often disappear from public discourse very quickly, while Euromyths can turn into long-standing tropes in anti-EU discourse.

During the Brexit debate, such Euromythic rhetoric also appeared in op-eds and commentary, which often were full of heroic and historical references and thereby sought to undermine rational debate by employing a more sentimental approach. The £350m lie paraded by Boris Johnson and others is merely a new example in this much longer trend.