The 2014 referendum was a mediatised political event and “media spectaclemedia spectacle” (Kellner, 2010: 76; 78), which was informed by representations in the press (Dekavalla in Med Cult Soc 38:793–810, 2016). This chapter considers the role of the press in communicating politically and analyses its contribution to narrating political events, decisions, and campaigns through rhetorical tropes and language use. It argues that newspapers’ mediated agenda-setting function shapes how political events and decisions accrue meaning in public debate. Specifically, the chapter holds that newspapers set the tone for public perceptions of the referendum as a festivalfestival of popular participation, democracy, and political debate (Mitchell in Scotland’s Referendum and the Media, Scotland’s Referendum and the Media: National and International Perspectives. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2016) and discursively defined the limitations of elite-sanctioned participation. Through critical discourse analysis of newspaper excerpts from nine Scottish and British quality papersquality papers, the chapter develops the idea that modes of popular participation were largely determined by representations in the media, which enacted and “made present” specific forms of political participation in, primarily, comment and opinion articlesopinion articles. By highlighting tensions between elite prescriptions and representations of popular participation in national newspaper discourses, the chapter reveals practices that promoted and sanctioned specific forms of participation while condemning others.