Representing nations as ‘things’: Media, nationhood and entitativity

This article offers two key contributions. First, it provides a novel approach to theorising the relationship between media and nationalism by drawing on the concept of entitativity to explore the ways in which mainstream media represent individual nations as ‘entities’ operating in a largely taken-for-granted inter national system. In doing so, it also addresses a largely overlooked question within the wider psychological literature on entitativity; how it might be possible to view the largest, most complex and, sometimes, divided social groups as entities. The second part of the article seeks to provide evidence to support these arguments by drawing on two data sets. The first involves a systematic content analysis of everyday media reporting during an ‘ordinary’ period. The second provides an overview of coverage of a major media event. Interestingly, while the relevance of two existing category groups, character and dynamic, is noted in relation to the major event, a new ‘discursive’ category is introduced to capture the manifold ways in which language and symbols are routinely used to represent nations as entities.