‘Out is out and that’s it the people have spoken’: uses of vox pops in UK TV news coverage of the Brexit referendum

ABSTRACT

This article analyses vox pops in British television news programmes during the 2016 EU referendum. It is informed by a data set of 383 vox pops across the three main terrestrial TV news programmes: the BBC and ITV’s News at Ten and Channel 4 News. A quantitative overview confirms two points made by [Greg Myers (2004). Matters of opinion: Talking about public issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, namely that in vox pops the majority of respondents are anonymous, and their exchanges with journalists are minimal. However the argument here is that it is not appropriate simply to criticise vox pops as inadequate forms of political expression; rather a qualitative discourse analysis focuses on their use as illustrations in journalistic narratives, informed by changing news agendas. In the EU referendum, this often involved visits to provincial locations where the majority of respondents were Leave voters; and it culminated in visits to the communities of Brexit voters which can be seen as paradoxical. On the one hand they illustrated the cultural distance of these voters from the metropolitan elite; but on the other they gave voice to a populist political rhetoric widely reproduced in the Brexit public sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Vox pops
• news value
• news agendas
• narratives
• ethnography
• public sphere
• statements of opinion
• populist discourse

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andrew Tolson was formerly Professor of Media and Communication at De Montfort University and Honorary Visiting Fellow in the Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester. He is also a founder member of the Ross Priory broadcast talk seminar (University of Strathclyde). His publications include Media Talk: Spoken Discourse on TV and Radio (2006) and the edited books Television Talk Shows: Discourse, Performance, Spectacle (2001) and (co-edited with Mats Ekstrom) Media Talk and Political Elections in Europe and America (2013). Since 2012 his work has concentrated on aspects of political communication and most recently, the uses of populist discourse in UK television journalism. Author postal address: Department of Media and Communication, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7JA, UK.