Media discourse and the Danish monarchy: reconciling egalitarianism and royalism

Abstract

This article investigates the role of the mass media as the dominant form of publicness in contemporary western societies, through a theoretical analysis of the impact of mediated publicness on relations between the state and the people, and an empirical study of a particular media event: the media representation of the wedding of the younger son of the Queen of Denmark, Prince Joachim, to Alexandra Manley on 18 November 1995. I analyse the wedding as a media construction based on a particular type of royalist discourse. This discourse is fundamentally modern in its incorporation of elements of egalitarian discourse and high modern or postmodern in its use of irony. Within the terms of the discourse, it is possible to express mild critique from a position of ironic distance, but open resistance lies outside its bounds. The media construction of the wedding within this discourse, therefore, provides part of the answer to the anomaly of the continued popularity of the monarchy in Denmark, a country with a strongly egalitarian political culture.

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