Contamination, deception and ‘othering’: the media framing of the horsemeat scandal

ABSTRACT

Food and consumption practices are cultural symbols of communities, nations, identity and a collective imaginary which bind people in complex ways. The media framed the 2013 horsemeat scandal by fusing discourses beyond the politics of food. Three recurrent media frames and dominant discourses converged with wider political debates and cultural stereotypes in circulation in the media around immigration and intertextual discourse on historical food scandals. What this reveals is how food consumption and food-related scandals give rise to affective media debates and frames which invoke fear of the other and the transgression of a sacred British identity, often juxtaposing ‘Britishness’ with a constructed ‘Otherness’.

KEYWORDS:

• Horsemeat
• scandal
• othering
• deception
• Eastern Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yasmin Ibrahim http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2510-6683

Notes

1 These comprised the quality titles (Telegraph, Times, Financial Times, Guardian and Independent); the mid- market titles (Express and Daily Mail) and the mass market or tabloid titles (Mirror and Sun). We did not look examine the local newspapers because this was primarily a national news story and we are concerned with a national ‘imagined community’.

2 This is not to suggest that they were monolithic. Counter-discourses emerged in the Financial Times that limited its coverage to complex supply chains (Lucas et al., 2013) and BBC News Magazine did reflect on why Romania has ‘such a bad public image’ in Britain (BBC News Magazine, 2013b). The Telegraph also explored a new fad in some of Britain’s trendiest restaurants for horsemeat (Archer, 2013). However, these remained minor discourses relative to the dominant, recurring ones.

3 Turner has drawn attention to what he calls the ‘gypsy anomaly’. Their exclusion from large parts of the country was legally sanctioned and they were regularly ‘pilloried’ in the press and their movement into particular areas was often labelled an ‘invasion’ (Turner, 2000, p. 68, 72; see also Guy, 2003; O’Nions, 2014; Richardson, 2014; Sobotka, 2003).