"She's just this sort of bigoted woman": the mediatisation of a political gaffe in British broadsheet newspapers

This case study investigates the coverage, in British broadsheet newspapers, of a political gaffe that occurred during the British General Election campaign of 2010. The analysis focuses on three aspects of this coverage that show how post-democratic politics is subject to the constraints and logics of a mass-mediatised public sphere. The first concerns the use of linguistic markers of sensory perception to allow readers to “witness” what happened. Although audiences thus acquired intimate knowledge about a political leader, they were also positioned as voyeurs who watched politics at a distance. The second aspect concerns the use of speech-representation devices to recontextualise the event of this gaffe into an underlying political issue of immigration. Here, the words of an ordinary voter were ventriloquised as being the voice of “the nation”. The third aspect concerns how journalists communicated the sources or bases of their knowledge, and how this provided evidence for the truth of their assessments. The overall analysis shows how political power in mediatised post-democracies is discoursal, and why it can be fragile and volatile.