Introduction

Love Island has, over the years, arguably become the nation’s biggest reality tv series as millions of
people come together in the summer and now winter, every day at 9 to watch these singletons find
love and fight for a 50k prize and with all this traction, also comes media buzz. In this investigation I
will be uncovering how the media use language to alter the contestant’s popularity according to the
odds they have to win and also how the fans react to them. I was inspired to look into this when I
myself as a fan of the show started to see inequality between how the show portrayed different
couples and it usually correlated with the headlines I woke up to the next morning so I decided to
finally try and gather data to prove my theory on how popularity controls the ITV series. This also can
be seen as a small scale representation of life in general as in most areas of life, especially in the teen
years, popularity and likability seems to have a huge effect on how people are viewed in society.
Hypothesis
I believe that my investigation will uncover how the media knowingly aim to influence there receivers
minds and perceptions on the contestants in order to push the favourites of the competition and bring
hatred upon the least favourites creating mass social media buzz, doing all this just by making small
changes to words which make a big difference for example deciding to use sensationalism rather than
facts or similes instead of metaphors. This all ties in with Stuart Hall’s theory of encoding and
encoding where the media encode and push their own dominant ideologies or decode and allow their
receivers to take what they wish from the articles and I believe that the media will be found guilty of
heavily encoding their articles just to get fans to like/turn on specific contestants based on not only
their actions in the villa but also their past, race, background and marketability.
Methodology
To get the widest range of linguistic evidence possible I have decided to utilise a wide range of
articles around the internet which involve the media either praising or bringing down certain
contestants due to certain factors that could play apart like marketability or skin colour. I also have
chosen to analyse some language from Episode 32’s “News Splash Challenge” and compare the
reactions to how different contestants how the headlines used effected the contestant’s chances in the
show
Modifiers
When it comes to determining the popularity of people in any aspect of life, the way you speak of
them to your audience arguably plays the biggest role in swaying an audiences preferences from the
the word go and long after the show is over. In reality, media outlets shouldn’t really have a reason to
be biased, however there are obvious ethical underlying issues that still haven’t been addressed to this
day for instance race and gender that play a partial effect on who the media decide to target without
even knowing the content of there personality. When they do target their favourites and least
favourites they use various language techniques to either boost or diminish their reputation and a huge
part of how they do it is by using post and pre modifications whilst they talk of them in articles. To
test the difference in treatment of contestants, I’ll take a favourite and winner of the show, who
happens to be a white male, Finn Tapp and pit his media coverage after the show was over against
Micheal Boateng, a black male who never even seemed to show up on the bookies odds list and was
slandered by fans on social media throughout his lengthy stay at the villa. In Finn’s case, him and
girlfriend Paige Turley always seem to be in the lime light together with headlines like “Paige Turley
and Finn Tapp’s incredibly romantic London date night” (ok magazine) and “Paige Turley and Finn
Tapp look more loved-up than ever”. We can see that all the tabloids favour the couples relationship
just by looking the string of adverbs, adjectives and nouns used to describe a simple date however the
tabloids know that the audience just want to be filled in on the gossip as much as possible so even if
they decided to sensationalise the story as much as they wanted to, the audience wouldn’t look into it
one bit, in fact it would just fuel their fandom for the reality stars and give them more reads from the
public. This links to how Fairclough showed how texts can be persuasive because of the ideologies
they rely upon for their effect, in this case the effect being them trying to push the couple also one of
the best reality couples to come from the show. On the other hand, we have Mike Boateng who, from
the start, was never treated with the same respect as the other contestants, even to the point where the
tabloids started capitalising on Mike’s issues outside of the villa. For example a couple months ago a
headline from BBC news as “love island LYING PC Mike”. By using the verb “lying” as the pre
modifier for his name makes the reader, off face value, think he’s committed a serious offence in his
line of work when in actual fact, it was only a case of him lying for a day off work “out of panic”
when in reality it was his workplace that committed a harsher offence when they racially profiled
Mike as another man by the same name who had committed an offence that could have lost Mike his
job. When taking this into account we can see that the intention of the headline was to get fans to
ultimately turn on Mike without even going on to read the article which has seemed to work as he has
among the least amount of followers from the show. While he stands at 449k followers, Finn towers
over him at 1.4m followers.

Semantic field
Another significant difference that can be clearly noted as a reason as to why the audience has been
hugely swayed in one direction is the type of semantic fields built up during the course of these
carefully constructed articles. In Finns case, throughout all of the articles written about him and his
other half Paige, using many high frequency adjectives there are the recurring semantic fields of love,
happiness, and positivity without a hint of negatively or criticism of the two. For instance looking at
the article about their so called “incredibly romantic” date, adjectives consisting of “luxurious” and
“mouthwatering” were utilised in their bid to glamorise the couples evening for the couples stay
especially with the adjectives, plus nouns like “champagne” having connotations of glamor, royalty
and exclusiveness. This could be linked to synthetic personalisation as by using these words, the
tabloids are giving the place they had their date so much praise which wold lead to the readers
wanting to go there and try it for themselves. This could even allow the company to up their prices as
their value in the public eye would be increased thanks to the tabloids. However if you take a look at
the articles about the dates that Mike and his girlfriend Pricilla who is also black, you wouldn’t find
the same raving reviews that you would with Finn and Paige. In fact when looking at the article, it
claims that the safari date the two proceeded on seemed “fake” and “staged” to some. Instead of
focusing on what actually happened on the date, Mike asking Priscilla to be his girlfriend, they
decided to focus on allegations the date could have been fake which have gone on to be disproven and
the only reason that this could have logically been the thing to focus on seems to be that the tabloid
must have had an agenda against the couple. The couple also coincidentally got voted out the villa a
few episodes later
Discourse structure: Quotes
A common theme throughout both articles written by these tabloids, weather they happen to be
reporting on Finn or Mike is they decide to use as many quotes from the fans and the show itself but
instead of using them in the same context for both contestants, the tabloids like to use these quotes to
suit whatever agenda that they hold on the contestant they are writing about. For example, The Mirror
decided to ridicule Mike for supposedly having four tries at love in the villa using quotes by the fans
and other islanders to help push their negative agenda, siting that on costar calling him things such as
“untrustworthy” and a “game player” along with the fans throwing vulgar slurs at him consisting of
“f**king snake” and “Absolute melt”. After reading these comments, any casual fan would see judge
Mike on what he is proclaimed to be, however it can certainly be argued that he has been wrongly
called these things as if you really watched the show, you could see that Mike wasn’t the one hopping
from girl to girl for pleasure but in fact, the first girl he was with split up with him and the second girl
decided to go with a different guy when Mike wasn’t in the villa and not to mention that his intentions
with the third girl in question was never romantically which he cleared up after he left with the fourth
girl and now girlfriend Pricilla. Mike even blamed ITV for the deformation of his character as he said
in an interview with my brothers, Ben and Emmanuel Tedeku that “the powers that be (production
team) made it seem like id moved straight on … which wasn’t the case, the next day I actually didn’t
speak to anybody … then the powers that be came to speak to me and they wanted me to move on”.
So by knowing this information, a convincing case could be made for Mike blaming the cooperative
work of firstly ITV for making it look like he was a “gameplayer” and secondly the tabloids for
hounding in and focusing on this narrative, giving both watchers and new viewers doing research the
impression that Mike is really what these hardcore fans that slate him portray him to be.
Sentence Structures

One of the rare similarities between the way the news sources treat contestants when writing
about them is how they carefully construct their sentences to fit their biases and sway the
receiver to their ideals. For example, in the article that Mike is branded as “lying PC” by the
BBC, there is a consistent use of simple sentences throughout the article in order to make it
seem to the reader that every statement that is made is a fact that needs little to no
explanation. They could be doing this as a way to utilise their big brand name as the BBC is
roundly known as a highly trusted source across the uk and with them knowing this, they also
could know that if they decided to state facts in a news story, a lot of the uk public would
trust their word over another tabloids without a second thought so in this case they decided to
paint the picture that Mike is a lying ex-officer just because he lied out of panic as he was
under stress and only escaped his policing an instead of beating it. On the other hand, in
Finns case, the tabloids that write about him and girlfriend Paige use loads of complex and
compound sentences in an effort to explain there relationships and dates in as much pleasing
depth as possible. Take the sentence “Paige giggled away before the couple headed down to
enjoy their meal, sipping on rose bubbles and eating curry, prawns and burgers.” In this
sentence we see the tabloid go into detail about an event that could have been very simply
talked about and in fact didn’t even need to be talked about, however, the media’s job is to
make the nation fall in love with their winners so it is necessary for them to make their lives
seem as glamorous as possible.
To conclude, my investigation proved to be mostly accurate in comparison to my hypothesis
where I predicted that the small language and grammar changes which the media make within
their articles would make the difference in terms of manipulating the readers mind set when it
comes to who they admire or hate, using Finn and Mike as examples of this. I also predicted
about how Stewart Halls theory of encoding would be how most of these tabloids managed to
sway the audience’s interest from contestant to contestant without blatantly taking a side and
showing bias for the audience to pick up on which would discredit their reputation as a
reliable and neutral source. I believe that not much was proven wrong however I was
surprised at how limited the examples were that I had to pick from which could have been
due to deciding only choosing to focus on two contestants or it could have been that the
tabloids were so cautious of losing that neutral reputation that they focused in specifically on
the way they encoded their true bias. Finally I did indeed find some anomaly’s with certain
articles backing Mike and his relationship however I could only find two of these examples
out of the hundreds of articles that were written about him.