Abstract
This article offers two key contributions. First, it provides a novel approach to theorising the relationship between media and nationalism by drawing on the concept of entitativity to explore the ways in which mainstream media represent individual nations as ‘entities’ operating in a largely taken-for-granted international system. In doing so, it also addresses a largely overlooked question within the wider psychological literature on entitativity; how it might be possible to view the largest, most complex and, sometimes, divided social groups as entities. The second part of the article seeks to provide evidence to support these arguments by drawing on two data sets. The first involves a systematic content analysis of everyday media reporting during an ‘ordinary’ period. The second provides an overview of coverage of a major media event. Interestingly, while the relevance of two existing category groups, character and dynamic, is noted in relation to the major event, a new ‘discursive’ category is introduced to capture the manifold ways in which language and symbols are routinely used to represent nations as entities.
Keywords
Introduction
This article seeks to offer a new perspective on the relationship between media and nation by examining the extent to which mainstream media news reporting represents individual nations as ‘entities’ operating in a wider – and largely taken-for-granted – international system. Theoretically, it looks to build a novel framework drawing on three bodies of work. The first relates to the key concept of entitativity which was introduced and, subsequently, developed, and employed in the discipline of social psychology as a means of investigating the significance of group actions and commonalities. What, however, this literature generally fails to address is, how it is possible to view the largest and most complex social groups, including nations, as entities. This is where insights from Billig's seminal study of Banal Nationalism can be utilised as it addresses the media's role in (re)producing relatively stable national frameworks of meaning and understanding. Finally, Sewell's (1992) distinction between deep and surface structures provides a useful means of distinguishing between the, often, virulent debates to define this or that nation and the legitimacy of nationalism as an organising framework in the contemporary era. In combining these insights, an analytical framework is produced that points to the manifold ways in which nations are consistently represented and discussed as if they were coherent and homogenous units operating in a largely taken-for-granted international system.
The second part of the article then looks to support this framework by using two contrasting sources of empirical data. First, a content analysis of the British media shows both the degree to which news reporting focuses on ‘domestic’ issues, people and places but also routinely locates individual countries within a wider world of nations. Second, reporting on a period of collective effervescence, in this case the 2023 coronation of King Charles III in Britain, demonstrates the media's role in representing the nation as a ‘palpable reality’ (Blehr, 1999: 34) for a short period of time. It is the combination of these everyday and ecstatic forms of nationalism that contributes to the mediated representation of the world as composed of discrete nations with their own territories, histories and cultures.
Entitativity
Research seeking to understand the ‘groupiness’ of different groups has primarily built on the seminal work of Donald Campbell (1958), who argued that while questions about the reality of social groups is an ontological issue, the variance in how different groups are perceived could be studied empirically. To this end, Campbell developed the concept of entitativity or ‘the degree of having the nature of an entity, of having real existence’ (ibid: 17). Campbell identified a number of factors that might contribute to entitativity, ranging from shared physical characteristics or social features to the physical proximity of people in the same space. While, however, Campbell's work has become highly influential, he did not offer any empirical evidence to interrogate the concept of entitativity.
In order to address this lacuna, a growing number of studies have sought to pinpoint these features through empirical research, in the process identifying two broad category groups; character and dynamic. In the first place, groups that share specific features or characteristics are often ‘seen as unitary social agents capable of organised action’ (Dasgupta et al., 1999: 1001). These characteristics could be, for example, physical traits, skin colour, body markings or hair-style, or alternatively, social features, such as dress or other types of possessions. In terms of dynamic groups, people sharing a particular space or acting in unison, are often perceived as unified or coherent (Lakens and Stel, 2011). These features have been the subject of numerous empirical studies, with Lickel et al. (2000), identifying both character (similarity among group members) and dynamism (levels of interaction among members) as being highly correlated with perceptions of the most ‘unified’ groups.
Notwithstanding these insights, most empirical studies of the concept tend to focus on smaller groups that actually move in unison (Lakens and Stel, 2011) or use experimental methods that feature relatively small sample sizes (e.g. Sacchi et al., 2009). Neither approach has very much to tell us how it might be possible to view larger, diverse, spatially divided groups as (more or less) unified entities. If smaller groups come to be seen as entities through shared characteristics, similar clothing, moving together or simply occupying the same space, what of larger groups – made up of millions of people – from disparate places and cultural backgrounds?
Here, the role of the media might seem quite important in providing relatively consistent representations of such groups and yet the only empirical studies of media and entitativity focus on the impact of negative representations of a given minority group on individual members’ perceptions of entitativity (Seate and Mastro, 2015). Moreover, while there has been – to our knowledge – no specific study that employs the concept of entitativity in relation to the representation of nations and nationhood, work on the relationship between media and nation has grown over the last three decades and it is to this literature we turn to in the next section.
Media and nationalism
Studies of the relationship between media and nationalism can be broadly divided into four main areas; how nations are represented, how audiences respond to these representations, the extent to which media producers’ work is informed by national frameworks and the manner in which particular institutional, technological and/or legal structures facilitate or constrain national forms of production or consumption (Skey, 2022). However, for the purposes of this article, we will focus on work that has looked to understand the media's role in representing individual nations and/or the idea of nationhood. As we will see, most existing studies tend to examine representations during routine or extraordinary periods. Therefore, the comparative perspective offered by this paper is relatively novel.
When it comes to routine reporting, Billig's (1995) landmark study of Banal Nationalism noted the range of taken-for-granted linguistic and discursive features that are used to ‘flag the nation’ during ‘ordinary’ periods. For instance, deictic terms, such as ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘here’, ‘them’, are commonly used to address national audiences and locate stories in national contexts. Billig's arguments were picked up and applied to a range of media in a number of different settings (Billig and Skey, 2025). In relation to news reporting, which will be the main focus of this article, alongside the use of deixis, other work noted how much reporting was divided into national and ‘foreign’ issues, privileged ‘national’ figures and concerns and assumed that ‘national’ audiences would possess particular forms of knowledge (Madianou, 2012; Nossek, 2004). Many of these studies of media representations were developed prior to the emergence or mass adoption of digital technologies and, therefore, their ongoing relevance might be called into question in an era increasingly defined by audience fragmentation, user generated content and increasingly footloose forms of cultural production and consumption. However, it is not hard to find evidence for the continuing salience of nationally inflected content and priorities across a range of media (Skey, 2022) and settings (Chen et al., 2025).
This argument can also be applied when trying to make sense of the relationship between ‘news’ and the nation in the contemporary era. In many parts of the world, the popularity of many traditional news sources has fallen dramatically and consumption practices have also transformed (Soffer, 2013). At the same time, familiar features remain in terms of journalistic practices (Asik, 2019) and audience preferences (see Skey, 2022, for an overview). Moreover, as Guy Berger observes, news in the digital era remains familiar with ‘regard to three features: preferencing local and national news, domesticating news about other countries, and reflecting imbalanced flows between First and Third World countries’ (2009).
Likewise, when it comes to events designed to celebrate or commemorate the nation – what we have labelled elsewhere as ecstatic forms of nationalism (Skey, 2006) – there are recent empirical studies that have pointed to their ongoing resonance and profile in the contemporary era. Using a combination of textual, network and sentiment analysis, this work has shown the extent to which such events continue to be associated with widespread media coverage (both mainstream and social) and heightened emotional registers. These include sporting (Yu and Wang, 2015) political (Kjeldsen, 2016) and popular cultural (Stewart, 2020) events.
One final point is worth making at this juncture. This concerns the extent to which empirical studies of nationalism and media representations tend to focus on how certain groups or institutions are represented as more or less national within a given national setting (Skey, 2014). This is obviously an important contribution but, perhaps, underplays not only the impact of countless media practices in representing particular nations as coherent entities, but also the wider world, as a world of nations. This is the subject of the next section.
The particular and the universal
As Michael Billig has argued, we cannot underestimate the crucial link between the particular (individual nations) and the universal (the wider geopolitical system of nations) in underpinning, and reifying, national forms of organisation and imagination (1995: 83–92). In a related argument, Sabina Mihelj discusses a ‘grammar of nationhood’—parliament, head of state, flag, anthem, sporting team, capital, official holidays and so on—(2011: 28) that facilitates participation on the world stage, as well as naturalising, and legitimating, an international system of governance and sociopolitical relations. This is where both political (official visits, diplomatic conferences, and regional and global summits) and cultural events (international sports tournaments, awards ceremonies, marketing campaigns) can have a crucial role to play in representing the world as ‘cartographically and socially/politically divided’ units (Levermore, 2004: 16). Here, the role of media is absolutely fundamental in framing these processes, whether through partisan reporting (focusing on or celebrating ‘our’ representatives or activities at the expense of others) or introducing ‘us’ to other nations and, in the process, situating them within the broader geo-political system, again defined in national terms (Skey, 2014).
In trying to emphasise the mainstream media's role in representing both the particular and the universal, two further points should be made. First, socio-cultural, technical and political variations will have profound impacts on the specific types of national representations that are produced in a given country. For instance, this study focuses on Britain, a state-nation composed of three countries, England, Scotland and Wales (McCrone, 2002). It has a mixed media economy with a high-profile public service broadcaster, the BBC, which has a particular remit to represent both ‘diverse communities’ within the country as well as it's ‘values and culture to the world’. 1 In other parts of the world, the greater dominance of commercial or state-run media will produce very different representations of the nation as recent studies of China (Chen, 2025; Schneider, 2018) and the United States (Schertzer and Woods, 2021) have demonstrated. Elsewhere, cultural variations are also worth noting. For example, as we discussed earlier one of the key features of English-language news reporting is the use of deixis – ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘there’ – in both everyday and eventful reporting. However, in other parts of the world, deixis does not feature at all and we would need to examine other possible ways in which reports might ‘flag’ national objectives or address national audiences. For instance, Chen (2025) points to the importance of other routine linguistic features in flagging the nation in China.
In addition to these variations in how ‘news’ is produced and regulated and how individual nations are represented, it should also be noted that we are not putting forward an argument that media inculcate a similar range of views in everyone who engages with them, including what it means to be a member of a given nation. Rather, the point is that even the most ferocious struggles over how an individual nation is represented does not undermine the primacy of ‘the nation … as a salient frame of reference for delimiting personal and collective identities’ (Foster, 2002).
When looking to theorise this distinction, William Sewell's writing around deep and surface structures (1992) may be of particular value. Sewell was interested in how global capitalism is legitimated and naturalised but his arguments also apply rather well to nationalism. He argues that at the surface level different interest groups consciously and overtly struggle over symbolic and material resources (Sewell, 1992: 24). However, because these struggles take place within a common frame of reference they often obscure other possible ways of conceptualising sociopolitical relations. In this way, the ‘instability or unpredictability of [the] surface structures actually reinforce[s] … the deeper structure’ (ibid: 26). As a result, ‘deep structures are those that have become “second nature” and are accepted by all (or nearly all) political actors as essentially … taken-for-granted means to political ends’ (ibid: 22)
Connecting Sewell's arguments to wider work on entitativity, we can begin to theorise the media's role in representing nations, in all of their size and complexity, as – more or less – coherent entities. In the next section, the types of data that can be used to support this approach are discussed.
Methods
In Banal Nationalism, Michael Billig used a very simple day survey of the British press to lend weight to his overall thesis (1995: 109). In this article, we seek to build on and expand this approach through an analysis of everyday media reporting, alongside coverage of a major event, as a means of exploring the media's role in representing nations as coherent entities or ‘things’. Given the fragmentation of the media landscape in the last three decades, one might call into question the focus on mainstream media outlets in this study. However, they have been selected for two main reasons. First, while individual outlets are seeing audience losses, in combination they still attract sizeable numbers (Deacon et al., 2024). Second, they still offer an ‘agenda setting’ function that fuels wider debates on social media (Boynton and Richardson Jr, 2016). In order to analyse the ‘ordinary’ period, a systematic content analysis of the British media 2 was carried out, starting on Friday 3rd March 2023 and building a composite week thereafter. The period was chosen for two main reasons. First, it was important to compare an ordinary period of time that led up to – but was relatively distinct from – the major event, in this case the coronation of King Charles III, which took place on Saturday 6th May 2023. Second, there were no other major events planned for this period. For the composite week, the following media outlets were analysed; The Sun and Guardian newspapers (online editions), the main BBC news website, an evening news broadcast on the public service broadcaster (PSB), BBC Radio 2, televised evening news broadcasts on BBC 1 (PSB) and ITV (commercial).
The newspapers were selected as one is a tabloid (The Sun) and one a ‘broadsheet’ (The Guardian) and they come from opposing ends of the political spectrum (The Sun is conservative, The Guardian is liberal). BBC Radio 2 and BBC/ITV were chosen because they have the highest overall ratings for radio and TV respectively in Britain. Likewise, the BBC website is the most accessed for news in Britain (Majid, 2024). For each source, the unit of analysis varied slightly. For newspapers and the BBC website, the analysis focused on the major story on the ‘front/home-page’ of the outlet, the major sports story and the major business report (all identified in terms of word count). The biggest front-page story was chosen as it obviously indicates what the paper considers to be the major issues of the day while sport and business have been more closely associated with non-British actors and organisations, notably in the last 30 years. In other words, they would be more likely to be associated with non-national reports and issues. The top three stories on radio/television news were selected for analysis. In order to operationalise the key concepts of entitativity, the following features were coded; use of homeland deixis that indicates a national context (e.g. ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘the’ government/prime minister, ‘here’), specific country named in the story, mention of a place in Britain with no mention of the country, mention of a place in a ‘foreign’ country with no mention of the country, mention of a trans-national organisation (e.g. UEFA/WTO), story that is particular to Britain. The latter feature is the most subjective but draws on the idea that in most countries there will be reports that are only seen to be relevant to national audiences (‘our’ news) versus reports that involve ‘foreign’ actors or organisations that are either particularly noteworthy (‘foreign’ news) or may impact on ‘us’ as well (Nossek, 2004).
The sample and analysis of the major event was slightly different as part of the focus was on the extent to which the coronation dominated media coverage, thereby forming what Nick Couldry has labelled as a ‘compulsory mediated centre’ (2003). Here, as well as providing a comparison with the everyday coverage, the analysis also focused on the extent of the reporting in all British national newspapers on the day after the event alongside news broadcasts from BBC Radio 2 and BBC/ITV News. 3
Flagging the nation in everyday media coverage
Table 1 presents the results of a content analysis of British media reporting over a composite week during an ‘ordinary’ period of time, March–April 2023 and an extraordinary period, the coronation of King Charles III, May 2023. In the next sections, we focus on some of the main features of each before noting the major differences between the two.
Results of a content analysis of British media reporting during an ‘ordinary’ and extraordinary period in 2023.
The first variable, homeland deixis, refers to a form of rhetorical pointing, in which the meaning of certain common words or phrases, ‘we’, here’, ‘our’, can only be established in relation to the immediate context. The use of deictic terms allows individuals to locate themselves and their audiences in particular locales and contexts and, just as importantly, may point towards the ‘shared universe’ (Billig, 1995: 108) that they inhabit. Threadneedle Street interest-rate setters on
In this extract, we can see a number of features, including the use of ‘the’ as a deictic term that points to, and recreates, a wider national context. First, in the opening sentence, ‘the bank’ refers to the Bank of England which is responsible for setting monetary policy across Britain. 4 In the latter respect, it's worth noting that ‘core inflation’ also refers to the nation as the report is talking about circumstances in Britain and not other parts of the world. Finally, a taken-for-granted national framework is reproduced in mentions of ‘the domestic economy’ and ‘the annual cost of living’, where these measures of economic performance are expressed, and understood, in relation to a specific country. However, the BBC report does not explain these terms or their wider meaning, assuming that the audience will know what they mean.
Location markers
One of the most obvious ways of locating a story within a national setting is by referring to a specific country and, as Table 1 shows, this feature was identified in 77% of the reports. Interestingly, these location markers are often used to anthropomorphise a nation into a single actor with its own objectives, needs and abilities. The following quote from the sports pages of The Guardian offers a good example of this. Russia has seamlessly returned to football – and nobody seems overly perturbed. (26 March 23)
In this report, the term ‘Russia’ refers to the actions of a sports team who, as representatives of the nation, compete against other nations on an international stage. Through this process of ‘overgeneralisation’ (Schegloff, 1972) particular people, events or places come to stand in for the wider whole, so that nations are represented as concrete, unified entities acting in concert to pursue a desired end.
The next two variables, focusing on the naming of locations, complement each other and again indicate the degree to which media producers expect audiences to recognise places at ‘home’ in contrast to foreign locales. When places in Britain feature in news reports, they are less likely to be qualified with a national marker than locations abroad. This is akin to what Schegloff has labelled as ‘common sense geography’ (Schegloff, 1972) the idea that participants position themselves in relation to each other through the use of meaningful location markers and, in the process, assess and validate the other's credentials. In the case of the news, reporters in Britain assume that their audiences will know when they mention the place-name, ‘Newcastle’, that it refers to the city in the North-east of England and not the one in Australia, unless stated otherwise.
The small number of stories that mentioned trans-national actors indicates that most news reporting does not focus on their activities. Moreover, unlike most of the results, which were fairly standardised across all media, in this case, the contribution of one media outlet, The Guardian newspaper, far outweighed all the others.
‘Our’ business
The final single variable primarily drew on Christopher Hill's argument that, ‘there are … some things – the fire-fighters’ strike for instance – which are mainly ‘our’ business and others, like the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which are mostly considered other people's business’ (Hill, 2003: 237). The following example can be used to illustrate this idea: Heavy snow has caused hundreds of school closures across the country and misery for motorists - with seven-hour delays and 17 miles of congestion reported on the M62 …. Met Office yellow alerts remain in force across much of the country, and people have been urged to be aware of the risk of injuries from slips and falls. (BBC Website, 16 March 23)
The first story refers to a weather event that is a commonplace of news reporting in Britain. As Michael Billig noted, reporting of the weather tends to be divided into domestic and foreign with an emphasis on the former (1995: 116–117). As well as the direct reference to ‘the country’, there are a number of other features that locate the report in a particular national context. The ‘Met Office’ is the common abbreviation for the Meteorological Office, the National Weather Service. However, the report assumes that audiences will be aware of this and therefore does not bother using a location marker. As Billig notes, ‘in the universe of weather, there is only one Met(eorological) Office, the one … A home-land making move transforms meteorology into the weather. And the weather – with its “other places”, its “elsewheres” and its “around the country's – must … have its deictic centre within the homeland”’ (Billig, 1995: 117).
A number of useful conclusions can be drawn from this analysis of everyday reporting. First, they point towards the fact that British news producers routinely locate their reports within a national context, whether that nation is Britain, Russia, France, etc. Second, we can see that this process involves the utilisation of a range of institutionalised norms, including everything from micro-linguistic features (location markers, overgeneralisation, deictic language and metonymy) to the wider level of context, where producers make the pragmatic assumption that audiences will have broadly similar reference points, background knowledge and concerns, often defined in national terms (Sonwalkar, 2005). Third, when it comes to the representation of nations as entities in everyday media reports, we can see that the two forms of entitativity identified in the psychological literature (character and dynamic) don’t actually feature that much. Therefore, one of the key contributions of this study is to propose a new form, discursive, which focuses on the ways in which language and symbols can be used to present nations as entities, whether through deictic terms (‘we’, ‘here’) or the use of popular symbols, such as weather maps.
Having systematically explored the manner in which mainstream media reporting during ‘ordinary’ period represents nations as ‘entities’ as a matter of course, in the following section, we shift focus to explore media coverage during an extraordinary period, the 2023 coronation of the British monarch, King Charles III.
Eyes of the world turn to Britain and its pomp
Although contemporary media landscapes and audiences are becoming increasingly fragmented, major national events continue to be the focus for a range of co-ordinated practices. Moreover, by examining such heightened moments we can also see another means through which nations, in all of their complexity and diversity, are represented as, ‘an entity, a cohesive whole’ (Sani et al., 2007).
Unsurprisingly, all of the main British national newspapers covered the coronation of King Charles III in great detail, placing the story on the front cover and devoting between 9 and 61 pages to the event (See Table 2).
British newspaper coverage of coronation of King Charles III, 2023.
There was also blanket coverage of the event across three of the main TV broadcasters in Britain, BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV. This included seven hours of live coverage of the day's events (the coronation ceremony took place at 1100 and lasted around an hour) from 0700 until 1400. According to a report in the Guardian newspaper, the TV audience peaked at 20 million viewers with an 89% share (Waterson, 2023). This was by far the highest TV audience in Britain in 2023, beating the second-placed programme by almost 50% (Goldbart, 2023). In a similar vein, the most popular radio station in Britain, BBC Radio 2, devoted two and a half minutes of its 3-min evening news report to the coronation. The rest of the report focused on sports results and the weather.
If we return to Table 1 (above) we can see that a number of the features coded for both the ordinary and extraordinary period are similar. These include use of homeland deixis, reference to a named country, mention of a foreign locale with no mention of country and any variable indicating a national context. Given the degree to which such events are saturated with national symbols as well as feature high profile national representatives, this is perhaps surprising. In response, a number of points are worth making. First, the sample for the event was smaller and therefore more liable to be influenced by a few ‘outlier’ cases. For instance, the relatively high figure for trans-national organisations is explained by a number of stories that referenced the (British) Commonwealth, an international association of former colonies of the British Empire. Second, the coding schedule was designed to capture the ways in which nations were reported as entities rather than track in detail the employment or discussion of particular national symbols. Finally, we might approach these results from another perspective and note the extent to which everyday reporting resembles eventful coverage when it comes to key markers of entitativity.
In terms of differences, there are two categories worth flagging (is the report particular to Britain/Mention of location in Britain with no mention of country). In the first case, coverage of the coronation of King Charles III was not presented as a story that was particular to Britain, unlike around half of the daily media reporting. Indeed, the aforementioned references to the Commonwealth showed the extent to which the event was reported as something that was of international relevance. In the second instance, London – the location of the coronation – operates as synecdoche for the country as a whole, which accounts for the higher figure.
Beyond these specific features, the data shows the extent to which forms of ecstatic nationalism, events designed to commemorate or celebrate a national community, continue to generate almost blanket coverage from a range of media outlets (Skey, 2011: 95). In the process, media coverage of such events not only represents the nation as a community that can be seen, heard and idealised but also demonstrates its continuing relevance to substantial numbers of people. This would include both those who attend the event in person (many media outlets showed and/or discussed the thousands of people in London on the day of the coronation 5 ) as well as those who watched on television. In both cases, people were often seen to be participating in shared activities – watching the procession in London or taking part in ‘unofficial’ celebrations in more local settings. Many participants were dressed up in special outfits featuring national symbols or waved British flags. Again, we can see how forms of both dynamic (people sharing space or moving in unison) and character (wearing a uniform or carrying a key identity marker) come to the fore during such periods. Furthermore, the very fact that large numbers are participating in these activities lends the event credibility and makes it seem as if the nation continues to matter to a wide section of the population (Skey, 2009).
Having said all this, it is also worth pointing out that protests against the coronation were covered by most media outlets and some featured interviews with members of the pressure group, Republic, who ‘want to see the monarchy abolished and the King replaced with an elected, democratic head of state’. However, as we noted earlier, dissenting voices against a particular event, campaign or participant, do not necessarily undermine national frameworks per se. Here, Sewell's work on deep and surface structures can be usefully applied as protests at the surface level, in this case, around the suitability of a government system based on royal patronage, don’t undermine the stability of the wider structure. After all, the protestors weren’t arguing for a non-national system of representation, they were protesting against the current political system. Indeed, their website specifically states that they want to ‘rid the country of an institution that serves itself and those in power’ 6 (my emphasis).
Conclusion
This article has sought to understand the extent to which mainstream media represents nations as ‘entities’ operating in a taken-for-granted international system. Starting with a critical engagement with the key concept of entitativity, the degree to which a group is perceived as an entity, a novel theoretical framework was developed, using further insights from studies of media nationalism and cultural sociology. In the former case, work on the extent to which national frameworks are routinely represented through mainstream media offers one means of understanding why it may be possible to view large complex social groups, such as nations, as entities. In the latter, the adaptation of William Sewell's useful distinction between deep and surface structures allows us to theorise how even the most fearsome struggles between groups within a given nation rarely undermines what has been labelled as ‘the logic of nationalism’, the idea that the world is – and should be – composed of individual nations within a wider international system.
Using this framework, an analysis of media coverage from a range of contemporary sources (online news reports, radio and television news broadcasts) during both an everyday and eventful period was carried out. The findings demonstrated the extent to which these representations employ a host of linguistic, cultural and normative features that emphasise, in often ordinary ways, the ongoing framing of places, people and priorities in national terms. The eventful period, the coronation of the British king, Charles III, was also noteworthy for the way in which the various media reports almost exclusively focused on this particular story and, in the process, represented the nation as (relatively) unified at this point in time. These two data sets also illustrated the extent to which two existing categories used in psychological work on entitativity – character and dynamic – applied to media representations. These categories were fairly useful in making sense of eventful periods – where substantial numbers did co-ordinate activities and wear standardised outfits – but had little purchase in relation to the everyday. Therefore, a new category, the discursive, was introduced to better understand the ways in which routine reporting employs language and symbols to represent nations as ‘concrete’ units.
Finally, this article also demonstrates the importance of moving beyond the analysis of individual media reports, programmes or cases to offer a more holistic understanding of the extent to which media forms, content and structures can reproduce particular ways of understanding the world in an often taken-for-granted manner. Further work would benefit from applying this framework to non-Western cases, in particular.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.