Narrating the pandemic: COVID-19,China and blame allocation strategies in Western European popular press

Narratives in times of an epidemic

The importance of narratives in shaping our experience and understanding of the self (as part of society) and community has been widely recognised in cultural and literary studies as well as in psychology and sociology. Their major role, it has been claimed, resides in giving form to, providing reference points for, and helping to make sense of novel events and unprecedented experiences (cf. Gerrig, 2010; Morrison, 2010; Müller-Funk, 2012). Narratives draw on the human capacity to relate events and to imbue these relations with meaning (cf. Assmann, 2012: 122); through iteration, they also contribute to the naturalisation of certain connections. It is precisely this naturalising function of narratives, their capacity to act as ‘myths’ through which we understand the world, which is of primary interest to cultural studies informed by cultural-materialist, poststructuralist and postmodernist thinking (Barthes, 1972; Ryan, 2010; Storey, 2010). With the ‘narrative turn’ in the humanities, notions of narrativity have not only been widely popularised as an interdisciplinary analytical framework. They have also been applied to artefacts and practices outside the realms of fiction, including advertising, oral storytelling as well as images (cf. Bal, 2009). Most recently, cultural and literary studies as well as medical humanities have called for an expansion of the notion of narrative to include a variety of media and for a closer attention to the discursive elements of those trans- and multimedia creations (cf. Bolaki, 2016; Müller-Funk, 2012; Pietrzak-Franger, 2017; Ryan, 2004). ⁴

Epidemics of such infectious diseases as the sweating sickness, bubonic plague, syphilis and smallpox have afflicted humanity for centuries (on this, cf., for example, Cooke, 2009; Healy, 2001; Pietrzak-Franger, 2017; Shuttleton, 2007), often generating particular kinds of narratives. Narratives of contagion are hence an age-old phenomenon (cf., for example, Rosenberg, 1989, on the dramaturgical plotline of most epidemics). Such narratives have helped frame and domesticate a chaotic and unpredictable threat. They have offered answers to universal questions like ‘Why now?’, ‘Why me/us?’ and ‘Who or what is to blame?’ (Healy, 2001: 9). And while scientific progress seems to move our understanding towards allegedly more enlightened ways of seeing, established narrative formulas are perpetually recycled and can prove surprisingly persistent. Indeed, as Silke Meyer has shown, narratives are cultural practices that gain influence over time: the older they get, the more culturally established they become and the more readily they get accepted (Meyer, 2020). ⁵

In her 2008 study Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Priscilla Wald demonstrates how outbreak narratives are propelled by a variety of dichotomies: the exoticised global South is pitted against the scientifically enlightened global North; humanity is at war with a personified, often mystical virus; nature is cast as the enemy of humankind; scientists oppose bioterrorists who use the virus as a weapon (Wald, 2008, 2020: 2ff.). Not only are such dichotomies simplistic, they also have the power to naturalise and stigmatise. Perpetuating ideas about disease geographies, they put blame on specific groups that are then cast as an existential threat (Wald, 2008: 3). Such narratives veil the systemic causes that are at the centre of the pandemic (poverty, social injustice or climate change, for instance), creating the illusion that science will allow us to ‘go back to normal’. This happens at the cost of those most affected by the virus: the stigmatised and marginalised groups that will suffer the most when the next pandemic hits. Outbreak narratives, then, come at a human and economic cost that is hard to overestimate (Wald, 2008, 2020: 266–270).

In our analysis, we aim to elaborate and complicate Wald’s observation about disease geographies and Asia as the ‘cradle of diseases’. Using her notion of outbreak narratives as a springboard, we look at the way British and Germanophone newspapers have variously allocated blame to China. This strategy has made it possible to deflect attention away from the hazardously complex and enigmatic nexus of systemic factors responsible for the spread of the virus. Most recently, anthropologist Li Zhang (2021) has made a similar point about the need to abandon simplistic narratives of individual culpability and to consider COVID’s complex entanglement of (geo)politics, science and capitalism. Indeed, the COVID-19 outbreak narrative comes with a particular (sub-)narrative of origin that identifies China as the birthplace of the virus. What is more, this narrative of origin has been put into service of another: a parallel (sub-)narrative of invasion that portrays China as a threat to Western values and lifestyles. Both of these – seemingly unconnected – narratives are noticeable first, through the frequency with which they appear, and second, in the way they cleverly support each other. What they have in common is their power to legitimise discriminatory practices. Our aim is to offer a tentative, albeit sufficiently nuanced, study of the strategies of blame allocation that have been prominent in this context.

Popular news-media coverage: from the origin of the virus. . .

Despite the outlined differences between the three media outlets, two tendencies predominate the coverage of the pandemic (January–October 2020). On one hand, the so-called ‘Wuhan-virus’ is presented as engendered by China’s dangerous cultural practices; on the other hand, the spread of the virus to its neighbouring countries and the rest of the world is seen as a result of the country’s government, politics and its (mis-)management of the crisis. Particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, the newspapers tended to emphasise the Wuhan wild meat market as the zoonosis’ birthplace, where the animal-borne pathogen was believed to have been transmitted to humans (Bild.de, 2020j; Chalmers, 2020; Krone.at, 2020b).

These recurrent reports have been accompanied by evocative, highly affective imagery, which, when reiterated, maintains an image of the country as home to ‘barbaric’ customs. In MailOnline, two representations have been dominant: the blurred footage of a bat-eating travel reporter and multiple images of wildlife markets that – through their rhythms, their choice of colour, their tight framing – are suggestive of squalor and inhumane work and living conditions. Visually striking, such imagery signals the existence of a China that is far removed from the technological and economic giant it is reported to be. Fahey and Wood’s (2020) article is exemplary in this respect. The first image shows two work(wo)men – their faces cropped as they flank a pile of pinkish-grey cadavers – in red gear, squatting on a dirty floor, ‘working their way through a pile of skinned birds’ (Fahey and Wood, 2020). This same article features a man ‘holding up a rat destined to be served as someone’s dinner’, caged beavers, deer, snakes and porcupines, and two photographs of confiscated animal cadavers. These are followed by further images: one showing a group of people closely standing around a selling container; another, a tilted scene in which police officers stack up meat, yet another of a storefront, and a cropped photograph of various plastic bags and containers (some with frozen meat) discarded on what seems to be a cemented backyard. The article finishes with repeated screenshots of a YouTube clip in which a young female influencer eats a bat (Fahey and Wood, 2020). The clip and the images have been extracted from her travel website and depict, among others, a young girl holding the dead animal with chopsticks. Many of the captions narrativise the images, thus providing causal links between a variety of events: ‘The outbreak of a new virus linked to a wildlife market in central China is prompting renewed calls for enforcement of laws against the trade in and consumption of exotic species’. As cropped as it is, the captioned photograph does not really convey this message. None of its single of its elements suggest either wildlife or China or the spread of a virus. Its connections to the outbreak of the pandemic have been cleverly manufactured by its embedding in the text and supported by suggestive language (‘Dishes like beaver and raccoon’), which highlights the remoteness of Chinese cultural practices from ours (because a raccoon is generally not considered a dish in Western Europe). Indeed, interpreted in the sequence in which they appear, those photographs link the unsightly (unhygienic) vending sites (first) to the fashions popular among the young generations (one but last), thus allegedly revealing the grim reality of an unchanging China that remains committed to and perpetuates such practices. This strategy of showing rather than telling (or showing one thing and telling another), accompanied by a seemingly never-ending repetition of certain tropes and images, is often used by all three publication venues.

Similar tendencies can be found in Bild: ⁶ a photo-series accompanying an article about the reopening of the Wuhan markets shows masked marketers working under primitive conditions and selling shrimps out of dirty plastic boxes. Nothing has changed since the outbreak, the pictures seem to imply (cf. Bild.de, 2020g). Through their irregular visual rhythms, colours and composition (boxes and food stalls teeming with seafood and other animals, dead or alive), the accompanying images inspire trypophobia, feelings of unease, anxiety and disgust. ⁷ In these as well as in other Chinese market pictures, it is, above all, the visibility and immediacy of such images that make these practices appear particularly cruel to Western audiences, used as we are to seeing our meat in pre-packaged, ‘de-animalised’ pieces. What these pictures do is prevent viewers from dissociating meat from its animal origin. At the same time, viewers are enabled to moralise a practice that is, in the Western world, often abstracted, and, through its invisibility, can be safely stored away: European butchers work behind closed doors, not in the open street.

While the depiction of wet markets and caged wild animals is by no means predominant in Kronen Zeitung, the few instances likewise create a tension between text and image. The article ‘Close relationship: city in China bans dog and cat meat’ (Krone.at, 2020c), for example, shows images of caged dogs but also mentions (in the caption and the text) that most Chinese abstain from consuming pet animals and that many, in fact, have never tried dog meat. ⁸ The notion that dog meat is consumed regularly in China is thus demystified as a prejudice (Krone.at, 2020c). Yet the headline and the images convey different and somewhat contradictory messages. This raises two questions: first, why is an article on the ban of dog and cat meat in a single Chinese city associated with the discourse on COVID-19 in the first place; and, second, why are such images (which probably affect and potentially even enrage Austrian audiences) used if the consumption of dog meat is not a common practice anyway? The size and positioning of the headline and the images ensure that readers will perceive them before any other feature. This suggests that, despite the relativisations in the main text and in the anchorage, the dominant meaning of the article perpetuates wet markets as hotbeds of disease and pet-consumption as an alien and potentially dangerous cultural practice.

The frequency with which dogs appear in the context of corona reporting in all three news venues is striking, given the relative rarity of this food practice in China and the fact that canines are not believed to be able to pass on the virus to humans (cf. also Piatov et al., 2020; Thomson, 2020a, 2020c). Such pictures of man’s best friend, slaughtered to be eaten, make for pointed emotional manipulation, creating the outrage necessary to bring across the message of China as an exotic uncivilised Other, to blame for the crisis. ‘Despite international criticism, in some regions of China people still eat pets’, one article (Bild.de, 2020a) points out, betraying not only the double standard that accepts the consumption of farm animals as ‘natural’ while eating ‘pets’ is considered brutal. It also reveals the expectation that China adapt its eating habits to international (i.e. Western) standards. The article then goes on to point out the danger of wild meat markets: ‘The habitat of wild animals is being constricted, an unnatural proximity between humans and animals is created. The danger is evident in wildlife markets [. . .]. The more humans destroy nature, the greater the risk that the virus will jump.’ It is unclear in this line of argumentation how the destruction of natural habitats and the environment due to man-made climate change relates to the consumption of wild animals, nor is wild meat consumption comparable to eating dogs.

This moralising strategy of (implied) juxtaposition between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ is taken to the extreme by the Daily Mail. Rebecca Davidson’s (2020) article pairs two photographs of UK comedian and avid animal-rights advocate Ricky Gervais – well known for his crude humour and his specitic take on political correctness – playing with his pets with images of wet markets (and a video of a bat-eating woman). The stark opposition between a man lovingly attending to his dogs and a heap of canine carcasses mounting on a filthy market ground provide a stunning (and telling) contrast between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’: attentive and affectionate versus barbaric and brutal. Thus framed, Chinese culture stands out as the epitome of inhumanity. Equally drastic contrasts are manufactured by Bild. Here, a dpa (German Press Agency) picture captioned ‘Chinese delicacy – Stew with pangolin foetus’ shows a whole pangolin, cooked in what looks like a brown stew (Piatov et al., 2020). Interestingly, the foetus is served on a plate, the aesthetic of which, with its light rose- and green-flower pattern, resembles traditional Western tableware rather than being reminiscent of what might be conceived of as traditional ‘Asian’ design. This impression is reinforced by the white lace tablecloth and the type of cutlery used – all supposedly representing Western-style dining culture. The stark contrast created between Eastern ‘dish’ and Western tableware here might aim to suggest one irrevocable ‘fact’: even when given proper plates and cutlery, Chinese will be Chinese; they will continue to be barbarians. The Twitter comment section betrays the success of this strategy: ‘This culture is disgusting . . . but we are dependent on this [literally] “land of puke”’ (@geissblockAusK, 2020). While the Tweet cannot be seen as representative of public opinion more widely, it shows how disgust is put into service of othering in the images analysed but also how other concerns, for example, economic/political dependency, resonate and become entangled with negative affects as a result.

. . . to narratives of invasion

While narratives identifying the virus’s origin are often supported by drastic imagery that aims at the creation of affects like disgust or outrage, a second group of articles found in all three newspapers directly blames China’s government for the spread of the virus. Many of these articles work with rhetorics revolving around notions of competition, guilt and invasion. Such reports suggest that China might have covered up the existence and spread of the virus, thus preventing other countries from assessing the gravity of the situation and taking the necessary precautions. By faking facts and numbers, China’s alleged aim was to gain an advantage in the fight against the virus (e.g. Bild.de, 2020d; Piatov, 2020; Röpcke, 2020). Variants of this narrative include China being secretive about their medical knowledge (Bild.de, 2020d) while launching cyber hacking attacks on other countries, particularly the United States, to steal such information (Bild.de, 2020i; cf. also Krone.at, 2020a). It is possible for such accounts to coexist even if they imply similar patterns of behaviour (i.e. holding back or being secretive about medical expertise) on both sides. A variant of this tendency can be seen in MailOnline, which has not only repeatedly returned to the claim that COVID-19 was born in Chinese wet markets but also intertwined these accounts with reports on other alleged sources, like a meteor (Randall, 2020), while not failing to point out that other countries consider Britain to be entangled in the disinformation politics around the virus (Boyle, 2020; Wright, 2020).

Importantly, while MailOnline has, from the start of the pandemic, reframed the discussion of COVID-19 both in terms of a biological and an economic threat, it has also continued to stress the complicated relationship between the United Kingdom and China (by, among others, referencing the effects of the pandemic on London’s China Town). Simultaneously, it has highlighted the unparalleled powers of the country that manages to erect a hospital in 6 days, equips its policemen with AI-powered helmet cameras to detect ill pedestrians (You, 2020), considers robots as possible replacement for endangered doctors and develops a software capable of recognising one’s facial features behind the mask (cf. Chadwick, 2020; Reuters, 2020). The early reports of such technological mastery along with references to the New-Year celebrations in London’s China Town (accompanied by snapshots of Boris Johnson flanked by two Chinese dragons in front of Downing Street) established two things: while Chinese culture is part and parcel of domestic spaces, Chinese technology and infrastructure is still something to be dreamt of. This said, a type of invasion narrative was present in the early stages of the virus’s international spread, as MailOnline reported on a variety of ‘hunts’ after insubordinate travellers from China, who were believed to have brought the virus to the country.

In Kronen Zeitung, in some instances, China was not only established as the geographical place of origin but also explicitly blamed as the originator of the pandemic, which tries to distract from and simultaneously admits to its guilt by donating masks and equipment (Seinitz, 2000d, 2020b; cf. also Röpcke, 2020). The worldwide spread of COVID-19 is constructed here, as in several of Bild’s and MailOnline’s articles, as the direct result of China’s political system, characterised as totalitarian, oppressive and opaque (Seinitz, 2020a). It is because of China’s attempts to obscure the outbreak, these articles claim, that the virus was able to spread globally. China is not only afflicted with the virus, the political system itself is perceived as diseased (Seinitz, 2020a) and thus unable to handle the crisis without restricting personal freedom and without maximum governmental control.

These accounts gain credibility as they are accompanied by accusations of China’s human rights violations, propaganda and censorship. Such allegations often appear in the form of paratextual references, the two most common types of which are hyperlinks within the texts (e.g. Bild.de, 2020b; Piatov, 2020) and embedded content from external sources, such as Twitter or YouTube (cf., for example, Bild.de, 11 April 2020, 2020b; Krone.at, 2010 ), videos from press agencies (e.g. Bild.de, 14 June 2020; Krone.at, 2020b) or other newspapers (e.g. Bild.de, 2020b, 2020h, linking back to MailOnline). Both alternatives create the impression of a dense web of information supporting and legitimating the claims of the individual accounts. A Krone.at article titled ‘Untested broth’ (Krammer, 2020), for example, claims that an imprisoned Uighur woman was forced to pre-emptively drink unidentified traditional Chinese medicine against COVID-19. The site contains a hyperlink leading to a Krone.at article from 2010 reporting the installation of 40,000 CCTV cameras in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region, after conflicts between Uighurs and the Han Chinese (Krone.at, 2 July 2010). The link establishes a direct connection and continuity between the problematic treatment of the Uighur minority during and before the pandemic. Although China is constructed as capable of containing the spread of the virus, the victory is depicted as hinged on a political system based on oppression and achieved at the expense of democracy, freedom and human rights.

A typical strategy that Bild uses to spread ideas about China’s responsibility is to quote American sources – for instance, the FBI, US politicians or (former) President Donald Trump – often without evaluating or questioning the veracity of such statements (e.g. Bild.de, 2020d). MailOnline, likewise, cleverly resorts to reporting about Trump’s discursive battles, while reprinting his tweets (Thomson, 2020d). Since the context-giving captions are small compared to blown-up screenshots of the tweets, Trump’s ‘China Virus’ rhetoric often remains unquestioned. While the newspapers avoid making such easily refutable claims themselves, they do not shy away from distributing them without (much) contextualisation. Exemplarily, while the report about a lab-grown virus (Bild.de, 2020e) is refuted in a later article (Bild.de, 2020f), Bild leaves the original text available to read, neither adding a disclaimer nor a link to the later correction. MailOnline, on the contrary, often simply reports ways in which China reacts with censorship to any sort of criticism or repositions the corona pandemic in terms of a China–US struggle (Thomson, 2020b). Such moralistic critiques of China’s treatment of its population can veil broader political concerns. Like Bild displacing the discussion of these poignant issues elsewhere, MailOnline positions itself as holding a higher moral ground and thus not having to stoop to such debates (cf. Thomson, 2020b). Against the backdrop of the corona pandemic, Bild also likes to portray itself in its articles as a guardian of democracy and freedom of speech (e.g. Bild.de, 2020h). While concerns about censorship are certainly justified, they are part of Bild’s long-standing anti-China campaign (Meany, 2020), which becomes especially obvious given that other countries with similar human rights violations are featured comparatively rarely in the article. This is part of a general trend that sees the conflation of economic and moral/ethical concerns in the newspaper articles analysed: critiques of China’s rise to power and the concomitant dependency of the West are often discussed in unison with questions of morality and (Western) values (e.g. Stenzel, 2020).

An op-ed Bild article titled ‘Capitalism is not responsible for corona’ betrays an implicit conservative desire to maintain the status quo behind narratives surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. The commentator first draws on the established topos of China as uncivilised Other ⁹ and the wet market as a place in which transgressions of the boundaries between humans and animals are common practice, creating dangerous hybrid creatures: ‘Yes, the market is to blame for coronavirus. But not the one targeted by socialist politicians and intellectuals. It’s the market in Wuhan [. . .] human and animal viruses exchange their genetic material, and new mixed viruses are created’. Intellectuals and socialists are here implicitly presented as detached from the concerns of the common people, while personified Western Capitalism is presented as the saviour that will not only guarantee a continuous supply of food. Indeed, it becomes the ultimate solution to the problem, transforming Germany into an imaginary Garden of Eden, in which food (re-)grows in sterile and well-lit supermarket aisles:

Anyone who has visited the refrigerated counters or fruit departments of Rewe, Aldi, or Lidl in recent days must have felt like they were in the land of milk and honey [. . .]. Even in the biggest crisis for decades, the supply situation is one that no real socialist state has ever achieved. (Lokoschot 2020)

What the passage disregards is the fact that low-income workers, and often racially minoritised ones as well, are those that ensure the continued existence of capitalist structures, most of them being forced to work despite the health risks this entails.

Many of these articles betray thinly veiled anxieties about China’s threatening rise to world dominance. They do this by rhetorically creating a climate of competition. China, in these accounts, is stylised as the ‘winner’ of the crisis, ‘profiting’ from the pandemic while the rest of the (Western) world has to suffer the consequences. In Austria, for instance, since China’s lockdown ended, Krone articles have sometimes drawn on the semantic field of sports and competition. Apart from being its originator, China is constructed as the winner of the pandemic because the country was able to contain the virus and because its economy has been recovering more quickly than the United States’s or the EU’s (Seinitz, 2020a, 2020d). That the Chinese way appears to have been ‘victorious’ seems to strengthen extant notions of invasion. Already at the beginning of March 2020, Seinitz (2020b) described COVID-19 as a ‘New Silk Road’, thus alluding to the Chinese Road and Belt or New Silkroad initiative and envisaging the pandemic as a type of export product intruding on the Western market. The threat of Chinese global invasion was linked to a dystopian scenario when Krone.at author Kurt Seinitz (2020c) concluded his article with the following rhetorical question: ‘Brave New World with “Chinese features.” Is that what we want?’ Importantly, the German word for ‘features’ (‘Merkmale’) does not only mean ‘characteristics’ but also references the semantic field of genetics, which links this sentence to biologistic and racialised discourses of ethnic hierarchisation. In German Bild, this sentiment of competition further materialised in the idea that China is ‘laughing at us’, as demonstrated in articles that focus on Chinese celebrations after the lockdown was lifted. An article titled ‘China is celebrating, the world is suffering’ (Bild.de, 2020c) starts by painting a post-apocalyptic picture of the (Western) world after COVID: ‘State of emergency in the US. Second lockdown in Australia. Empty beaches in Europe’s vacation destinations. The world economy in ruins. Ten percent slump in the German economy. Empty stadiums’. The author then juxtaposes a Chinese Beer festival, here labelled ‘China-Wies’n’ (after the Bavarian Oktoberfest tradition), with the plights of German innkeepers. This parallel seems to suggest that the Chinese have not only spread the virus, which has led to what Bild has called the ‘worst pandemic in world history’ (long forgotten seems the bubonic plague); now, they are even stealing German customs (in a Westernised version of ‘cultural appropriation’). China should, the article implies, acknowledge its responsibility through remorse, not through celebrations. More or less implicitly, Chinese celebrations are read as victory poses, as the Bild article proceeds to present ‘5 facts’ that ‘prove’ that China has willingly endangered the world and is solely to blame for the pandemic. The image of a dystopian post-COVID-19 world, coupled with nostalgic reminiscence of the ‘good old times’, also surfaces in the final paragraph: ‘The Chinese regime has transformed our wonderful world into a world of masks [. . .] Our parents, grandparents spend their last years in isolation’. The look into the future is bleak (as the situation is imagined to last for years). What is pictured as a Western lifestyle (comprising such universal human needs and means of communication as physical contact or smiling), in this account, has been eradicated by China.

Conclusion: blame allocation strategies

In all three venues, the notion of a disease geography as Wald has described it finds expression in the narrative of origin that identifies the Wuhan market as the viral hotspot of the pandemic. Such an environment is envisioned to foster a dangerous proximity between humans and animals (or their products), mingling that which should be categorically separated. Effectively born out of this intermingling, the virus relegates the (potentially infected) Chinese to the animal realm: they themselves become dangerous creatures. Chinese (alleged) adherence to such outdated fashions as dog and bat eating is presented as one of the main reasons for not just the spread but also for the potential resurgence of the disease. It is important to note, though, that the notion of ‘dangerous’ foreign cultural practices has varying levels of saliency in Bild, Kronen Zeitung and the Daily Mail. These differences could be related to the varying political and historical relationships between the countries: Austria fashions itself as more neutral, its impulses of competition partially and traditionally concentrating on Germany; Bild’s open hostility towards China has been linked to the political agenda of its former editor Julian Reichelt (Meany, 2020); and the UK–China historical dependencies are a basis for a more ambivalent relationship.

The narratives we encountered tend to follow certain strategies to achieve their goals: all venues repeatedly use highly affective images, which often stand in contradiction to the texts they accompany. A multimodal analysis reveals occasional tensions between showing and telling and between what is reported and what is shown. Blame is often allocated in an indirect way through hyperlinks and embedding of other media sources. Through missing or insufficient contextualisation, disreputable sources and their narratives are transmitted without much qualification, allowing these papers to refute accusations of feeding its readers misinformation.

While we identify a coexistence of the concerns with the origin of the virus and scenarios of invasion, the most relevant strategy used to bring across this point is the conflation of economic and moral/ethical concerns. These ethical/moral concerns comprise China’s treatment of animals as well as supposed human rights violations by China’s government. The coexistence of (and linking to) articles that focus on China’s economic successes and technological advances and those that highlight the suppression of China’s population seem to suggest that this ‘brave new world’ comes at a price.

Narratives create the illusion of control. Once the Chinese population has been identified as culprits, it seems all but obvious how to stop the spread of the virus. This reassurance, however, is quickly undermined: not only are the Chinese presented as ‘irredeemable’, China is also constructed as an external threat that might soon invade Europe and assimilate everything that the Western world stands for. This representational strategy is hardly accidental: history has shown that the fear of ‘the Other’ might lead to more readiness in the population to support nationalist agendas, agendas all three newspapers (despite their slight differences) clearly agree on.