"Migrants are like cockroaches". Hate speech in British tabloids.

Following UN human rights chief denouncing the Sun over Katie Hopkins ‘cockroach’ column mentioned in the title of this paper (Jones 2015; Hopkins 2015), I will explore how the boundaries of the language of racism and xenophobia (i.e. ‘hate speech’) have been incorporated in public discourse on migration in the context of British tabloids. The language of othering is a crucial weapon in the armoury of nationalist rhetoric and is also part of strategies of consent building in societies framed by convergent cultures, where media manipulate individual responses through printed and broadcast news (Fairclough 2000). This paper adopts a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach (Machin and Mayr 2012) to shed light on a range of linguistic strategies of extreme othering, focusing on overt cases of ‘hate speech’, by building up on previous research (Sindoni 2016). Cases of lexical choices (e.g. structural oppositioning, use of quoting verbs), visual semiotic choices (e.g. information value, salience, framing), representational and ideational choices (e.g. classification of social actors, e.g. personalisation vs. impersonalisation, van Leeuwen 1996), transitivity and verb processes will be illustrated. These strategic choices will be analysed in context by drawing on systemic-functional theories of language and semiosis of communication to unearth the functions they play in discourse, for example showing how they conceal or take for granted through and via language and visual design in contemporary corporate media outlets, with a view to how boycott campaigns launched on popular social media draw upon, and are influenced by, visual compositional meaning-making. In the concluding remarks, some reflections will be presented to point out how verbal and visual resources are exploited in discourse of othering, in particular in hate speech, with reference to migration. The combination of verbal and visual strategies points to rapid and relatively unpredictable social and cultural changes. The stage of acceleration and intensification in globalization processes raises fundamental challenges for the ways in which we imagine societies, human beings and their activities (cf. Eriksen 2001; Arnaut, Spotti 2015).