ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses how the language of the news can act to exclude vulnerable outsider communities as part of the process of media audience construction. It identifies the mechanisms that appear to predetermine the ways in which newspaper language is deployed to maintain reader identification in terms of constructing human rights as a threat to national sovereignty and security. It could be claimed that one of the functions of news, beyond the simple provision of information, is to create a form of information that can consistently map onto audience expectations of insider/outsider groups. At the start of 2016, several running news stories became a catalyst for human rights issues, related to fears of intrusions into Britain territorial and judicial space. The two most prominent stories are associated with the refugee crisis that is deepening by the day and the impending referendum on Britain's place in the EU.
