Discursive constructions of the summer 2015 refugee crisis: A comparative analysis of French, Dutch, Belgian francophone and British centre-of-right press narratives

Abstract

Studies in Communication Science indicate that repeated exposure to media has considerable potential to shape audience attitudes to and (dis)engagement with reported issues of public interest, such as migration flows. Therefore, this study examines representation practices of refugees in right-leaning elite press narratives of French-language Belgium, the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands at the peak of the EU refugee crisis summer 2015. The discourse-analytical approach probes into the interpretative aspects of the news content by examining representation practices like collectivization/individuation of the protagonists and assignment of positive/negative semantic roles to the refugees, thereby giving/depriving them of agency and potentially enlisting readers’ compassion or creating a discourse of moral panic. To see whether the refugees have become the object of politicization, we also explore the semantic roles assigned to the three most frequently mentioned non-refugee actors common to the four newspapers (the EU, Germany and Hungary).

Images of Immigrants and Refugees

“…As for the material action verbs, negative actions appear twice as much as positive action processes, but their numbers are still negligible in comparison with the neutral action verbs and the passive processes in general. Therefore, just like the findings about the center-right newspapers' coverage of the refugee situation in that same crisis period (Lams, 2018), no moral panic or threat frames underlie the narratives of these center-left newspapers.…”

“…The selected objects of investigation are accounts about the European refugee situation of late summer 2015 at the height of what was perceived as a crisis, in the Dutch-language progressive quality press De Volkskrant [VK] for the Netherlands and its equivalent in Belgium, De Morgen [DM]. The choice for the progressive press accounts facilitates comparison with an earlier study of the more conservative elite press of a number of countries, including the Netherlands and Belgium (Lams, 2018). 2 Findings in that study demonstrate that the refugee actor received hardly any agency.…”

“…2 This article is part of a larger project which analyses cultural and ideological convergences and divergences in a selection of British, French, Dutch, and Belgian media narratives about immigration. In a first phase, a cross-cultural discourse analysis examined the refugee coverage in what has been called the more conservative press, like the Times (UK), Le Figaro (France), La Libre Belgique (French-language part of Belgium), and De Telegraaf (the Netherlands) (Lams, 2018). The second, ongoing instalment compares the narratives of the more progressive press in the same countries (The Guardian, Le Monde, Le Soir, De Morgen, De Volkskrant) to eventually draw a comprehensive picture of the coverage across the ideological spectrum.…”

“…Yet, we first highlight recurrent scholarly conclusions about international (mainly Western) media coverage which deserve closer attention of media practitioners and politicians. The main findings relate to the high level of collectivization of the refugee actor (e.g., ThorbjØrnsrud & Figenschou, 2016;, who is also deprived of a direct voice, since most forum space is given to the political elites, shifting the plight of the refugees and their personal histories to a focus on how the arrival of refugees creates a 'European crisis' (e.g., Philo, Briant, & Donald, 2013;Kaleda, 2014;Benson & Wood, 2015;ThorbjØrnsrud & Figenschou, 2016;Lams, 2018). An additional highlight concerns the context-dependent fluctuations between themes of securitization ("narratives of security") and humanitarian themes ('narratives of care') (Benson, 2013;Caviedes, 2015) or between the 'intruder' and 'victim' frames for the refugees ThorbjØrnsrud & Figenschou, 2016).…”

The 2017 Rohingya Crisis: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Representation in The Daily Star

“…The conflation of categories related to RASIM is also seen in news [14], [20], [21], and can misinform the public about their situations. Metaphors have been studied extensively to explore how they function in discourse surrounding RAS [22]- [24]. Diachronic research has studied how coverage changes with time and how representations evolve [21], [25], [26].…”