Beyond the ‘refugee crisis’: How the UK news media represent asylum seekers across national boundaries

Abstract

Migration is one of the most pressing, divisive issues in global politics today, and media play a crucial role in how communities understand and respond. This study examines how UK newspapers (n = 974) and popular news websites (n = 1044) reported on asylum seekers throughout 2017. It contributes to previous literature in two important ways. First, by examining the 'new normal' of daily news coverage in the wake of the 2015 'refugee crisis' in Europe. Second, by looking at how asylum seekers from different regions are represented. The content analysis finds significant variations in how asylum seekers are reported, including terminology use and topics they are associated with. The paper also identifies important commonalities in how all asylum seekers are represented-most notably, the dominance of political elites as sources across all media content. It argues that Entman's 'cascade network model' can help to explain this, with elites in one country able to influence transnational reports. BEYOND THE 'REFUGEE CRISIS' their political agenda (KhosraviNik, 2009, 2010). Donald Trump credits his tough stance on refugees with helping him win the US Presidency, for example. And asylum seekers were one of the most salient issues during the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, when the public narrowly voted to secede from the European Union. During the campaign, the 'Vote Leave' group frequently portrayed these migrants as both economic and security threats, setting boundaries between 'us' and 'them' (Stewart and Mason, 2016; Virdee and McGeever, 2018). Researchers have paid significant attention to the role of the news media in supporting and reinforcing negative depictions of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants. Studies show that news media frequently portray those seeking asylum as an economic and

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Migrant Racialization on Twitter during a border and a pandemic crisis

“…Security threats relate increasingly with terrorism and other forms of criminality ( Holmes and Castaneda, 2016 ; KhosraviNik et al., 2012 ), and they are enhanced by sensationalist language ( Holmes and Castaneda, 2016 ). Specifically, media link different types of crime to different ethnicities: Arabs or Middle Easterners are cast as terrorists in Europe and the US ( Cooper et al, 2020 ), and Latinos as deceitful in the US ( Chavez, 2001 ). This is the typical way of migrant racialization in the media.…”

“…The study of the relation between traditional media and migration is a well-travelled trail ( Cohen, 2002 ; Cooper et al, 2020 ; Xu, 2020 ), which is increasingly focusing on social media and migration ( Ekman, 2018 ; Lee and Nerghes, 2018 ; Ozduzen et al, 2020 ; Rettberg and Gajjala, 2016 ) and their intersections ( Pöyhtäri et al, 2019 ; Siapera et al, 2018 ). The representational field, offline and online, around migrants and refugees in the Global north moves between securitization and humanitarianism ( Siapera et al, 2018 ) shaped by Eurocentrism and orientalism ( Avraamidou, 2020 ; Xu, 2020 ).…”

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