The article reports an attempt to establish what image is created for Bulgaria on the pages of international media. The study collates results from two methodologies: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Corpus Linguistics (CL) based on the assumption that discourse is a social activity structuring and revealing the power relations involved in producing that discourse.

Many people in Bulgaria feel that ever since the country joined the European Union, attitudes to Bulgarians range from mild dislike to severe chastisement. A member of the Internet forum of the quality Bulgarian newspaper Sega writes: ‘That is why they let us join – they needed somebody to punish and kick around.’ Another Sega reader continues: ‘As if being the poorest in Europe makes us any worse than the others.’ Numerous contributions in the forum claim that corruption in West-European countries is as entrenched in social life there, as it is in Bulgaria, but it is Bulgaria that bears the brunt of EU sanctions. So what grounds exist for the feeling that Bulgaria is presented in a strictly negative light? Could it be the work of international media which creates the negative image?

I collected a corpus of articles about Bulgaria published on the website of the BBC over a period of one year and then compared the topics with the publications dedicated to other European countries of similar standing. The comparison was expected to establish whether the BBC approaches Bulgaria differently from other countries. To triangulate the findings I conducted a key-word study of the corpora, using the methods of Corpus linguistics.

A Useful Methodological Synergy: CDA emerged in the late 80s as a method of studying "opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language" (Wodak 1995:204). Fairclough (1992), the founder of the research discipline, constructed a social theory claiming that discourse is a societal phenomenon which reflects and creates social relationships through language interchanges. Therefore, language use can be regarded as a map of the status of the participants in that discourse. Those theoretical premises opened the door for studying the language of media as an indication of the attitudes to groups of people (e.g. Sotillo 1999, Downs 2002, Huckin 2002, Gabrielatos and Baker 2008 etc.).

Corpus Linguistics (CL), for its part, is a recent methodology which bases its research on large collections of language explored by electronic means (Sinclair 1991). The principled selection of the material for the corpora and the objective statistical methods guarantee that the analysis is unprejudiced and reliable. Many recent investigations of discourse are assisted by corpus studies, thus giving rise to a trend called Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS, Partington, 2004, 2006). Baker et al (2008) establish that CDA and CL complement each other as CL gives an objective bird’s-eye view of the researched problem seeking breadth, while CDA narrows down on the located relationships for an in-depth exploration of the emerging trends.

Research Question. The problem posed with this research is what image is created for Bulgaria on the web pages of the BBC through the selection of stories to be covered and the language used. The BBC was selected as a medium which specialises in the coverage of world news. The Corporation claims objective reporting and, unlike other agencies, such as Reuters, has no focus on a specific field, such as economics.

Methodology. A comparative approach is taken to the coverage of Bulgaria. Firstly, is it the case that fewer articles are published in a year about Bulgaria than about other countries of a similar standing? Secondly, is the range of topics similar to those about other countries? Thirdly, which words stand out in the publications and can they be construed as revealing specific tendencies?

Galtung and Ruge (1965) establish that media coverage is governed by criteria such as:

If a medium adheres to these principles, then the coverage of ‘non-elite nations’ would follow a similar pattern. However, should different selection principles be applied to Bulgaria from those applied to other countries of similar standing, then the deviations should be considered evidence for bias.

On the basis of proximity, European countries only are included in the research. Bulgaria’s population of 7.6 million and territory of 110 000 sq km is relatively comparable to: Belgium (10.5 million population, 30 500 sq km), Portugal (10.5 million population, 92 200 sq km), Finland (5.3 million population, 338 000 sq km), Denmark (5.4 million population, 43 000 sq km).

Firstly, content analysis (Krippendorf 2004) is applied to stories about Bulgaria and Belgium to discover guiding principles in selecting what topics are covered for each country. Then the established principles are tested by scrutinising articles about the other three countries in the study. A socio-historical study (Reisigl and Wodak 2001:15 ) of the general context at the time of the coverage is conducted to check how adequately the realities are reflected, whether events are ignored by the BBC or given undue prominence.

Content and historical analyses are CDA approaches. The findings are expected to show what stories are covered and what events are ignored. As a basis for establishing bias, these results are then triangulated with key-word analysis (Xiao and McEnery 2005). The method comes from the tool box of Corpus Linguistics and reveals the frequency of which words exceeds or trails behind the frequency of the token in a general reference corpus. Big differences are considered indicative of the importance attached to topics, people, places and attitudes. The findings may coincide with the established conclusions from the CDA analysis, or add new perspectives on the country coverage.

For researching the corpora and establishing key word lists, the Word Smith Tools (Scott 1999) are employed. As a reference corpus the British National Corpus (BNC) is chosen.

Corpora. The BBC website was searched for the occurrence of the word Bulgaria between July 2008 and July 2007. The comparative corpora for Belgium, Finland, Denmark and Portugal were constructed on the same principle, within the same temporal limits. The size of the corpora, therefore, is dictated by the attention given to the country by the respective medium. However, in line with the view that corpora lack representativeness if they are under 25 000 words (Clark 2007), no CL methods are applied below that limit.

Content Analysis. Table 1 presents the topics of the articles about Bulgaria and Belgium published by the BBC between July 2008 and July 2007 and gives the number of stories for each category.

Quantitatively, the coverage of Bulgaria is smaller by more than 20% and except for the first position – sports, the pattern is different. For Bulgaria the stories include crime, government, regional affairs and disaster, while for Belgium it is social issues, government, crime, economy, entertainment. Apart from a more varied content, the coverage of Belgium strikes with a markedly positive attitude. It seems as if Galtung and Ruge’s (ibid.) criterion ‘bad news is more newsworthy’ applies to Bulgaria only.

When covering social issues from Belgium, the BBC’s approach can be characterised as highlighting the ‘human angle’ and ‘cultural proximity’ factors (Galtung and Ruge ibid). In some cases, contact between the two countries is involved, such as the sightings of a missing English girl in Belgium or a memorial article dedicated to English soldiers who fought in the Second World War and were buried in Belgium. Negative stereotyping of British people in advertisements for the train service between the two countries is reported by the BBC, while Belgians are quoted to admire the posters. In other cases parallels are drawn between issues debated in both countries. For example, a series of articles discusses the problem of national identity where more than one nation is included under a common statehood, making parallels between the UK and Belgium. Problems of multiculturalism are covered extensively, such as the case of a Welshman living in Belgium with a Spanish partner looking for a Welsh-speaking au pair; miss Belgium who does not speak Dutch booed by a Flemish audience etc. Foreign immigrants to Belgium are covered on a regular basis – an article appears nearly every month, implicitly projecting issues which are valid for the UK as well. Furthermore, problems concerning moral values are discussed from the Belgian point of view, such as the outcry of Catholic priests in Belgium against the image of Christ used in an advertisement, attitudes to euthanasia, respect for national symbols etc.

For Bulgaria, the number of articles on sports is equal to the number of articles on crime, while for Belgium crime is covered in articles twice fewer than the number for Bulgaria. The lion share of attention in this group goes to the case of the Bulgarian medics arrested in Libya and their release. There is a time-line of the events, the biographies of the arrested people and in-depth analysis of the case. This is a case which fulfils nearly all the criteria for newsworthiness on Glatung and Ruge’s scale, so it would be difficult to miss it. The second greatest number of articles on crime report EU criticism of Bulgaria for the existing graft and crime. Thirdly, the BBC boasts an achievement in discovering canals for illegal trade of children in Bulgaria. Equal in number are the articles about a British football fan arrested and sued in Bulgaria for the murder of a Bulgarian man. The case of the Bulgarian author Georgi Markov, allegedly killed in London by the Bulgarian secret services is also given attention, one of three cases of contact between Bulgaria and England. The third case is a British national bitten to death by stray dogs in the Bulgarian village where she settled (in effect, an immigrant to Bulgaria, but never given this qualification by the BBC).

While Bulgarians tend to be the perpetrators in the crime stories covered by the BBC, Belgians feature as the victims in most of the articles. The majority are about the French rapist Fournier, who was active both in France and Belgium. Belgians attacked in the UK feature as objects of reports. A Rwandan army officer is reported to have been sentenced for the death of Belgian peace-keepers. Belgium is featured as the setting for the arrest of former Congo’s Prime Minister. The trail of al-Qaeda suspects in a Belgian court is extensively covered from Brussels. The closest to accusations of wrong-doing on the part of Belgians come three articles about alleged involvement of unnamed individuals in a child-pornography ring. The main suspect, however, is Scottish and Belgians appear mainly victimised again.

The third topic of interest in Bulgaria are regional issues on the Balkans, mainly – the recognition of Kosovo. One article is dedicated to an event in Shrewsbury organised to break the negative stereotypes about eastern Europeans by featuring Bulgarian and Romanian food and dances. Ironically, the BBC admits that a negative image exists for Bulgarians and it can be amended if attention is given to mundane positive issues, but does not seem to engage in that.

In both Bulgaria and Belgium there has been a governmental crisis in the featured period. The crisis in Bulgaria is covered by 2 articles reporting the change of ministers. For Belgium 15 articles are published, including commentators’ opinions, interventions from various agencies to break the stalemate, assessments of the impact of the crisis on various aspects of social life.

As for economic topics, the coverage is equal – 4 articles about each country. While the emphasis for Belgium is on transport, with Bulgaria it is the outsourcing of high-tech productions, gas transit through the Balkans and the rise in house prices.

The subject of EU governance and co-ordination is tackled in two articles in the Belgian corpus. There is nothing about Bulgaria in this respect, but it has attracted attention as a threat to ecology in two articles, compared to none – about Belgium. Belgian entertainment topics feature in 3 articles, compared to 0 – for Bulgaria, science and technology in Belgium are covered in one article, against 0 – for Bulgaria.

From the content analysis, it appears as if Belgium is featured in connection with issues of human interest or as a basis for social comparisons. This may be due to the fact that Belgians and British often get in contact as neighbours, but it can also mean that events in Belgium are deemed comparable to British events while the Bulgarian context is considered far too exotic for parallel. Bulgaria tends to appear on the offending side of crime or be the butt of criticism about crime, corruption and ecological problems. What gives Bulgaria an unfavourable image, therefore, is not so much the focus on aspects of life which are negative, but the lack of attention to issues of human interest, the reluctance on the part of the BBC to seek analogies on societal aspects.

So far, a pattern has been established that Bulgaria is associated with negative aspects of life and social-life issues are avoided. On the next stage, the corpora for the other European countries are analysed to ascertain whether this tendency is maintained or not. Table 2. gives the number of stories about each of the remaining countries in this survey.

As can be seen, the coverage of no other country in the sample excludes social issues or issues of culture, science and technology. The trend to cover sports events extensively persists, while the number of stories about social life is even greater than that for Belgium. The topics include Finland as the leader in secondary education according to a UN survey, followed by an extensive study of the relevance of early schooling featuring all the countries in this sample plus a number of others, but not Bulgaria; Finland as the healthiest place to live and as the seat of Santa Claus; Denmark as a monarchy and its links with the British Royal Family; Denmark and Portugal as former colonial powers; the plight of migrants in all the 3 countries; the positive attitudes to disability in the three countries etc.

Most of the content goes against Galtung and Ruge’s axiom that bad news should prevail. At the same time, the number of the crime stories for all the three countries together is roughly equal to the number of crime stories about Bulgaria. The criminals are a psychic who goes on a shooting rampage in a Finnish school, al Qaeda operatives, or vandals. It can be safely claimed that the local citizens tend to be victims rather than perpetrators. Even the story of the English child who went missing during her holiday in Portugal is not covered as a crime story, but together with other deaths of British tourists enters a rubric of ‘holiday disasters’ for which no blame is sought, just sympathy is extended to the victims.

But perhaps during the period in question nothing happened in Bulgaria to warrant coverage of social, cultural or cultural issues? For comparison, the Reuters, for example, published articles on topics such as: the change of the industrial profile of a region, attitudes to a gay parade, the first registered Cyrillic domains, the impact of introducing new mobile phone operators, the sales of luxury boats, emergency telephone 112, etc. Bulgaria also features as part of the protests around the globe against the rising petrol prices. Interestingly, a report of UN and national police data reveals that the Balkans are much safer than Western Europe. Therefore, it is the choice of the BBC to ignore such topics and focus on crime instead.

Key words. Key words according to Scott’s definition (1999) are words whose frequency in a specialised corpus shows a deviation from the frequency in a general corpus (the British National Corpus was used for this study). They can be proper nouns – either personal or place names, indicating the participants and places featured in the corpus; or grammatical words, such as would or shall, which reveal dominant abstract meanings, like modality or tense; or common nouns, in which case they point to the ‘about-ness’ of a text. A comparison with a general corpus can show which words are of a higher frequency in the specialized corpus and thereby establish highlights in the specialized corpus. This relation is known as positive key-ness.

Table 3 compares the first 20 positions in the keyword lists for four countries.

The place names include the country name and the name used for the people and languages spoken in the country. Bulgaria is the only country for which the abbreviation EU precedes in key-ness the name of the capital and the nationality name. Other place names also come more frequent – Libya, Kosovo, Croatia and Serbia. The nationality of the children allegedly infected with AIDS by Bulgarian medics is at the top of the list, as well as the nationality of the Palestinian doctor on trial together with the Bulgarian nurses. The name of the French president is given greater prominence than that of the Bulgarian. The coverage of none of the other countries includes foreign toponyms or names of heads of other countries.

Table 4. compares the lists of the words of frequency higher than the reference corpus in two corpora – media articles about Bulgaria and Belgium on the BBC website after removing the proper names.

The frequency reflects the major topics for the two corpora: the case of the Bulgarian medics released from a Lybian prison after a commuted death sentence and the case of the rapist Fourniret – in Belgium.

On the other hand, in the corpus for Belgium words connected with law have a key status, such as prosecutors, trial, arrests, investigators, verdicts, Europol, police. As can be seen from Table 4., they outnumber and outweigh the semantic group of murder, rape, kidnap etc. . Therefore, the focus there is on the legal process and its institutions.

The keywords in the Bulgarian corpus, when the Lybian case is ignored, easily combine in two groups: 1. smuggle, smuggle, smuggling, smuggled, trafficking, trafficker; 2. criminal, crime, mafia, killings.

Apart from that, the key status of ‘undercover’ and ‘BBC’ in the Bulgarian corpus stands out. The concordance shows that the BBC boasts discovering a child trafficking group in Bulgaria through an undercover journalist investigation.

A check on the BBC website shows that undercover investigations are quite common in the UK, revealing cases of poor hygiene in social institutions, bribery in tests for acquiring citizenship, the hardships of immigrant life, alcohol sold to underage children etc. As for cases outside the UK, reporters have gone undercover to Burma to discover how people are recovering from cyclone Nargis, electoral fraud in Zimbabwe, life in North Korea, caging of children in the Czech Republic, the brothels in Cambodia and Thailand. The list shows that the BBC takes no risks in sending out undercover reporters to places where wrong-doing would be hard to find. Therefore, targeting Bulgaria as the place for such investigations is a tell-tale sign for the reputation of the country. The word ‘undercover’ does not appear as a key word in any of the other corpora for this study.

Another key-word of positive key-ness is ‘corruption’. It does not feature with a frequency higher than the reference corpus for any of the countries in the corpora for this study. The coincidence of the word ‘corruption’ is quite high with ‘Bulgaria’, among a list of countries, such as Italy, Georgia, Turkey, Iraq, Nigeria and Russia. A search on the Reuters website also elicits Bulgaria as the most frequent match in relation with corruption.

Concordance lines. Further, studying the concordance lines, a word with a positive meaning, such as organised with a key status in the Bulgarian corpus collocates only with crime. The concordance of smuggle offers unique cases where the verb is used with specific agents in a context which is boastful rather than deplorable:

The word mafia appears once in the expression mafia-style killings, but for the rest of the cases it forms a stable collocation as the Bulgarian mafia. The word killings occurs more often than not with the attribute contract and corruption associates mainly with high-level or a special corruption monitoring scheme. A frequent cluster is crime and corruption.

The most frequent cluster in the Belgian corpus is was arrested in Belgium, which clearly indicates that the country is only the backdrop against which the events occur. The same can be said for the other countries in the study.

Keywords with a high prominence in the corpora about Finland, Denmark and Portugal are ‘website’, ‘camera’ and ‘video’. They refer to stories how the Danish Prime Minister went jogging with friends from the popular website Facebook, how criminals were caught using video footage on CCT cameras or how the maniac who opened fire in a Finnish school left a video message on his blog. Words from this semantic range do not appear in the Bulgarian corpus, although the Reuters covered the event of the first Cyrillic website registered online. The BBC did not consider it newsworthy.

Conclusion. The data from the content analysis show that events from Bulgaria are covered differently from the pattern established for the other countries in the corpus. Crime stories about Bulgaria outnumber those for the other 3 countries together, while social issues are under-represented. While parallels on moral topics are drawn based on current events in the other countries in this research, Bulgaria is left outside such an approach. At the same time, the key-word analysis reveals that vocabulary connected with the legal processes of sentencing the culprits outnumbers the crime-related vocabulary in the corpora for the other countries. This is reinforced by the observation that the local citizens in the non-Bulgarian corpora are presented mainly as victims and the countries as the backdrop of catching criminals or staging trials. Vocabulary related to electronic media, such as CCTV, the Internet etc. has a high degree of key-ness in the non-Bulgarian corpora. A significant fact is the high frequency of the key word ‘undercover’ in the Bulgarian corpus. None of the other European countries in the corpus has been subject to undercover investigations on the part of the BBC, which leads to the conclusion that negative coverage for Bulgaria is deliberately sought and achieved.

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