The British Empire in BBC travel documentaries: investigating multimodal manipulation

The path towards economic and social equality between Britain and ex-colonies, and between people within ex-colonies, can be arduous if the public opinion does not appreciate the extent of past colonial exploitation and its long-lasting effects. Indeed, recent opinion polls (YouGov, 2014, 2016, 2019) suggest that the British Empire is still seen in a favourable or neutral way by a significant part of the British population.
Multimodal media manipulation can play a pivotal role in hindering this process of critical awareness. Despite some disagreement on what manipulation is and how it works, scholars in Critical Discourse Studies and pragmatics have found Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) useful in investigating manipulative processes thanks to its theorisation of variable contexts and individual cognitive environments (de Saussure, 2005; Maillat and Oswald, 2009; Hart, 2013; Maillat, 2013; Oswald, 2014). The paper focuses on the representation of the British Empire in two BBC documentaries, Burma with Simon Reeve, episode 1 (2018) and The Great Australian Railway Journeys: Adelaide to Perth (2019), and how this is negotiated by two British viewers.
This paper begins with an overview of the concepts of manipulation and epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al., 2010). Then, it exemplifies the analysis of multimodal manipulation by looking at the representation of the British Empire and by focussing on social actors and processes (van Leeuwen, 1996). Finally, by combining reception theory and principles from Relevance Theory, the paper investigates media effects and manipulation in individual media interactions drawing on a novel methodological approach for the analysis of media effects (Author, 2021). The reception element, moreover, allows to triangulate the researcher’s semiotic analysis with that of the viewers and to validate analytical and interpretative constructs borrowed from Social Semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001; van Leeuwen 1999) and Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies (Machin and Mayr, 2012; Machin 2014) for the analysis of social actors and processes.