Tripodos

Media Framing of the Refugee Crisis at the Periphery of Europe

2023-04-16T15:17:23+00:00

The recent European refugee crisis, which began in 2015, has generated academic interest in how media portray and frame migrations and refugees, specifically in their influence on how “We” perceive and accept “Them” in “Our” societies. However, research primarily focuses on EU member states and destination/receiving countries. Therefore, our study examines media framing of the refugee crisis in Serbia between 2015 and 2016. Building on frames previously identified in the Western context, we pre-defined three frames: viewing the refugee crisis as a problem for the political system, society, or refugees. These frames were coded as external/internal based on whether the media text discussed the crisis outside/inside Serbia. Our deductive análisis shows that framing differs from destination countries, with a minimal emphasis on social problems in Serbia. Political issues and challenges faced by refugees were dominant but externalized, showing a slight decline over time compared to the social problem frame, which followed real events. Furthermore, our inductive thematic analysis reveals a new way of framing refugees as a problema for the free movement of our citizens. It also reveals a meta-frame of “Us” (in Serbia) as acting in a humanitarian manner amid hard circumstances created by “Them” (Western politicians) who are not handling the crisis in line with the EU values.

Refugee Representations by the Greek Public Administration: A Critical Review of the Greek Institutional Discourse

2023-04-14T17:39:40+00:00

This paper examines the political narratives employed in strategic communication between Greek authorities and the public administration during the refugee flows of 2015-2018. It also looks into the formation of images concerning refugees within the Greek political context and contributes to the existing literature on discursive representations of refugees. The study delves into the role of political rhetoric in strategic or non-strategic image formation, thus revealing the other side of media representations. It focuses on an overlooked aspect of political communication: the discourse of public administration institutions. The methodology uses qualitative content analysis with elements of discourse analysis, focusing on press releases from public administration institutions involved in the refugee crisis, as well as a selected corpus of public speeches from government members and local authorities. The institutions examined include the Ministry of Migration Policy, the Regional Administration of North Aegean, and the Regional Administration of South Aegean. The research covers the period from January 2015 to April 2018, encompassing a total of 159 press releases issued by the authorities under study regarding the refugee situation.

From Belief to Hate. An Analysis of the Beliefs That Support the Hate Speech Towards Migrants and Refugees Spread on Twitter from the Theory of Reasoned Action

2022-09-30T21:38:26+00:00

This study seeks to identify the beliefs that underlie racist and xenophobic attitudes, in addition to the perceived pressure that influences the spread of such hate speech through tweets in Spanish. Thus, a content analysis based on the reasoned action theory was carried out. The main findings show that direct interactions with migrants and refugees play a crucial role when it comes to publishing or withholding racist and xenophobic messages. Besides, perceived social pressure is the primary reason for most of the racist and xenophobic hate speech on Twitter in Spanish, which suggests the need to explore how formal structures of power influence discourses on migration. Finally, the study analyses the relationship between the connotative frames used to represent migrants and refugees, and the beliefs underlying such attitudes, thus identifying how the migration frames used to spread hate are created.

The representation of immigration in the Spanish press from a gender perspective (2008-2019)

2023-04-06T09:51:40+00:00

The aim of this study is to analyse how the press portrays the phenomenon of immigration from a gender perspective. To do this, we have selected four of Spain's leading newspapers: El País, El Mundo, La Vanguardia and ABC. We worked on a corpus of 886 analysis units, compiled in the period 2008-2019 using the quantitative content analysis method. The results reveal four noteworthy aspects: the simplification of migration reality by obviating the gender issue and, when this is addressed, under-representing immigrant women; the linking of women to more social and integrative perspectives, while men are more associated with conflict and delinquency; the quantitative over-dimensioning of the immigrants' African origin with respect to the real figures; and, finally, when the gender issue is taken into account, the main source is the migrants themselves, so that the migration phenomenon is presented from the experiences and feelings of the people involved in the process.

Analysis of Media Discourse and Social Audienceson Refugees in the Conflict in Ukraine

2022-09-30T17:44:18+00:00

The anonymity provided by social networks offers those who promote the rejection of refugees an ideal space to publish and expand their discriminatory discourse. The aim of this research is to analyse the discourse of the social audience of the Spanish press in relation to refugees. In this sense, we have extracted and analysed the comments written by Twitter users on the news referring to refugees as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine during the month following the start of the conflict (from 24 February to 24 March 2022) by the five newspapers with the largest number of followers on this social network: El País, El Mundo, ABC, eldiario.es and La Vanguardia. A total of 1.581 comments on 232 news items. Through the critical analysis of the discourse, the positioning of the media themselves and their social audience on refugees in the context of the conflict was determined. On a quantitative level, a content analysis of the feedback received by the media was carried out to measure the impact generated by this type of news. The results obtained show the different frames in which refugees are represented, with negative frames being understood as indicators of rejection and hatred.

Italian Migration Policies and Newspaper Communication: A Case Study

2021-02-10T18:51:50+00:00

Communication and migrations can represent a binomial that pushes towards changes that involve manifest actions or not of individuals in societies in which the presence of multiple cultures is now a given. The theoretical starting point is the sociology of knowledge in Mannheim. This article investigates the effects on cultural changes of the communication-migration binomial, specifically on the media language and system of ideas around migrations. We will consider as “milestones” (with a before and after) the laws or agreements that marked the historical and social context of migration in Italy over the past few years. We aim to verify through the analysis of the “words” whether and how the media's language (limited to «la Repubblica») has modified the language used to represent migrations and the related contents dealing with problems of general interest connected to the phenomenon of migration.

Openness as a new communication strategy for political parties

2022-03-21T11:28:08+00:00

Spanish and Portuguese political parties are highly distrusted by citizens and need significant democratic regeneration. The promotion of transparency and citizen participation by political organizations might be a useful communication strategy. However, previous academic studies have not paid much attention to political parties in assessing openness, transparency, and accountability. Rather, they have focused on administrations. This article not only explores transparency but also the rest of the open government principles, these being participation and collaboration, as performed by political organizations, and as new communication strategies. The paper will argue that political parties should implement these ideas because of their public role but also to demonstrate honesty and integrity to the electorate. The implementation of transparency, accountability, deliberation, decision-making and collaboration by Spanish and Portuguese political parties has been analysed through a detailed study of the information available on their websites. The results of this analysis show that political parties are still far from being open and should focus especially on developing principles that involve citizen interaction. Although transparency was the most developed aspect, further promotion of participation and collaboration would imply a paradigm shift in how parties communicate with the electorate.