Refugees in the media

Since 2015, the European ‘refugee crisis’ has become one of the most divisive political issues, repeatedly capturing news headlines across the continent.

Through the language and images they choose to use, journalists may contribute to greater public hostility or hospitality towards people who cross Europe’s borders. Consequently, the media play a key role in shaping public debate around migration.

Media scholars have explored the variations in tone, terminology, imagery, and thematic focus in media reporting of the ‘crisis’ within and between countries. They show that news reports range from those that actively promote hate speech and hostility towards migrants to more sympathetic accounts of the hardships they often endure.

This ambivalence in media representations is reflected in the two ‘figures’ of the refugee that tend to dominate news coverage: the ‘victim’ and the ‘villain’. The former tends to portray the crisis as a humanitarian emergency, focussing on the plight of refugees in camps and along their journeys. It is often accompanied by portrayals of helpless and vulnerable refugees, especially children and women. The latter, by contrast, focusses on their potential threat to national security and identity, links to criminality and terrorism, and the need for greater border control. For example, the UK media landscape is distinguished by prominent right-wing tabloids such as the Daily Mail and The Sun that routinely endorse a hard-line, anti-refugee perspective which emphasises the threat that migrants pose to Britain’s welfare system.

While seemingly opposed to each other, both perspectives, media scholars argue, are easily interchangeable. By reducing refugees to either vulnerable or dangerous outsiders, they deny the full humanity of these individuals. Furthermore, they serve to marginalise their voices. Indeed, a range of studies of European media coverage of the ‘refugee crisis’ have found that “refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and migrants, regardless of their country of origins, are rarely quoted within news reports” (Cooper et al. 2020). As a result, they have only very limited opportunities to speak directly about their diverse experiences of displacement, with female refugees in particular almost entirely excluded. Instead, they are generally spoken for by various political actors, humanitarian organisations, or journalists themselves.

This silencing of refugees’ voices and testimonies matters. It contributes to a process of “symbolic bordering” (Chouliaraki, 2017) that divides “Us” from the “Them” and reinforces the geopolitical borders between Europe and the “rest” of the world.

However, mainstream media are not the only ones able to represent the refugee crisis. Digital media, as the next step demonstrates, offer spaces for refugees, grassroots volunteers and activists to challenge dominant media narratives about migration and borders.

References:

Chouliaraki, L. (2017). Symbolic bordering: The self-representation of migrants and refugees in digital news, Popular Communication, 15:2, 78-94.

Cooper, G., Blumell, L., & Bunce, M. (2020). Beyond the ‘refugee crisis’: How the UK news media represent asylum seekers across national boundaries. International Communication Gazette. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048520913230

Georgiou, M., & Zaborowski, R. (2017). Media coverage of the ‘refugee crisis’: A cross-European perspective. Council of Europe report. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Available online: https://rm.coe.int/1680706b00