Visibility without voice: Media witnessing irregular migrants in BBC online news journalism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journalistic practices in the representation of Europe’s 2014–2016 migrant and refugee crisis
Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies, 2018
Since its surge in 2014, the migrant and refugee crisis has been a major issue for the European community, not only impacting the geopolitical, economic, societal and humanitarian sectors but also challenging media practices, narratives and framings. This special issue investigates journalistic routines, norms and representations of migrants and refugees in western mainstream and digital media by questioning innovations in journalistic practices. Drawing on a wide range of case studies and various methodological approaches, the contributions in this issue, both from scholars and practitioners, analyse different journalistic ecosystems and visual narratives. Have stereotypical portrayals of migrants and refugees from previous episodes of massive displacement been challenged? How were the visual politics of migration shaped by a humanization discourse? To what extent did editorial choices and newswork routines adapt to this type of crisis reporting? How have media narratives shifted through several western contexts to engage audiences into this human tragedy? In the end, this issue aims at exploring a variety of dynamic approaches related to the media perspective on representations of migration and refugee studies, in the light of new potentials offered by storytelling and immersive forms of journalism.
The Migration Conference 2017 Proceedings, 2017
Digital media played a prominent role as a source of information about the last refugee crisis. Refugees leave their countries of origin due to threatening events, while migrants are motivated by material conditions. Journalistic framing helps to understand how refugees are depicted in digital press outfits; it consists of selecting and highlighting certain aspects of reality in a text, so that it suggests a definition for the described situation, as well as their possible causes and treatment; frames have been studied from the perspective of news production as well as that of the audiences; they act as abstract structures that organize the elements of a communicative text, but some of them are issue-specific. A content analysis was conducted on news about the refugee crisis published by the top 4 Spanish digital diaries by number of readers, to describe how they framed those contents over a six month period. They were mainly centred around the journeys of refugees, clearly from the perspective of the European receiving countries. Mentions to poverty and physical integrity won over terrorism and crime, generally pointing to the victims’ frame over their depiction as intruders. The next challenge is to analyse the effects over the audiences.
In this paper, we analyse how news images of the 2015 Syrian refugee 'crisis' visualise refugees and how, in so doing, they mobilise various forms of moral responsibility in 'our' mediated public life – various practical dispositions of action towards the misfortunes of migrants and refugees at Europe's border. On the basis of empirical material from European news (June-December 2015), we construct a typology of visibilities of the 'crisis', each of which situates refugees within a different regime of visibility and claim to action: i) visibility as biological life, associated with monitorial action; ii) visibility as empathy associated with charitable action; iii) visibility as threat, associated with state security; iv) visibility as hospitality, associated with political activism; and v) visibility as self-reflexivity, associated with a post-humanitarian engagement with people like 'us'. In conclusion, we argue that, important as these five categories of visibility are in introducing public dispositions to action towards the vulnerable, they nonetheless ultimately fail to humanise migrants and refugees. This failure to portray them as human beings with lives that are worth sharing should compel us, we urge, to radically rethink how we understand the media's responsibility towards vulnerable others.
Refugees or (im)migrants: (re)conceptualizing and (re)contextualizing migration in the media
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2023
The article examines how the media around the world perceived and reported on migration and refugees in the period from 2015 to 2022 in five selected countries, during the period of the strongest waves of the European migration crisis, the adoption of international agreements for their (political) solution, as well as the beginning of the Ukraine conflict. The first aim of the study was to find out whether we are witnessing an increasing similarity or diversification of the content of migration-related news in five different countries and languages and whether theoretical reconceptualizations that have emerged in migration studies have a significant impact on the way migration is reported in the media. Overall, our study shows that empirical contextualizations have a more significant impact on media coverage of migration than theoretical conceptualizations. In other words, theoretical conceptualizations that have emerged in migration research do not have a significant impact on the way migration is reported in the media. Other (news) factors or values arising from specific social contexts are more important. For example, the coverage of migration is primarily situated in a national political context and reflects the most important issues of the time. Thus, our analysis shows that the media in Slovenia paid relatively high attention to the November 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. However, the reason for this was not the content of the Compact, but the fact that the Compact was discussed in the Slovenian parliament and the Slovenian right-wing media used this discussion as an opportunity for a series of comments directed against migrants who were portrayed as having come to Slovenia en masse and illegally. Moreover, the concepts of "migrant" and "refugee" often overlap in journalistic discourse, further underpinning the lack of a clear conceptualization of migration in the media, despite the fact that academic and journalistic fields of knowledge are very different and in some respects almost mutually exclusive.
Symbolic bordering: The self-representation of migrants and refugees in digital news
Popular Communication, 2017
In this article, I combine theorizations of the selfie as an aesthetic and technological practice of digital self-representation with a theatrical conception of spectatorship, inspired by Adam Smith, in order to argue that the selfie has the potential to operate as a significant ethicopolitical spectacle in the spaces of Western publicity. I exemplify my argument by using the remediation of migrant and refugee selfies in mainstream news as a case study of 'symbolic bordering'-as a technology of power that couples the geo-political bordering of migrants in the outskirts of Europe with practices of 'symbolic bordering' that appropriate, marginalize or displace their digital testimonies in Western news media.
Restoring the Migrant Voice on New Media
In this paper we examine the cross-border tensions presented by the refugee settlement dubbed the "Jungle in Calais". Calais has been the focal point of debates about illegal entry into the United Kingdom. The "Jungle" as a physical entity is often enmeshed into debates of illegality and violation of the White suburbia through the unauthorised movement of the migrant. In mainstream media debates, the migrant is rendered voiceless often appropriated into discourses of immigration policy and transgression of territorial borders. The human trauma of migration is silenced through the distancing of the human subject in media discourses. We analyse how civil society organisations and interest groups use new media to restore the voice of the migrant enabling them to tell their stories through narratives and images not shown in mainstream media. The restoring of the voice to the migrant becomes an important device in enabling proximity and the reconstitution of the migrant as real and human.
Migrants and Media Newsmaking Practices
Thematic Report 2011/02: Media Content. Robert Schuman Centre For Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence., 2012
The MEDIVA project seeks to strengthen the capacity of the media to reflect the increasing diversity of European societies and promote immigrant integration. To achieve this objective, the project will organize the knowledge produced so far and will create a searchable online database of all relevant studies on media and diversity/integration issues that will be made available for use by the media professionals as well as the general public. Building on the existing work and combining it with a series of in depth interviews with senior journalists across Europe, the MEDIVA project will generate a set of media monitoring indicators (which will be available in 8 languages) that can work for different media, in different countries, and that can provide the basis of a self-and other-assessment and future monitoring mechanism in the media. Four thematic reports will be written to reflect on how journalists and other media professionals deal with migrant diversity in five areas of their work: in recruitment/employment conditions; in training provided; as regards codes of ethics; in news making and programme production; in presenting diversity (news content). Finally, five Regional Workshops will bring together media professionals, NGOs and researchers to discuss the role of the media in promoting migrant integration. The MEDIVA project is hosted by the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies and co-ordinated by Prof. Anna Triandafyllidou (anna.triandafyllidou@eui.eu ). The EUI and the RSCAS are not responsible for the opinion expressed by the author(s).
Rethinking media responsibility in the refugee ‘crisis’: a visual typology of European news
Media, Culture & Society, 2017
In this paper, we analyse how news images of the 2015 Syrian refugee ‘crisis’ visualise refugees and how, in so doing, they mobilise various forms of moral responsibility in ‘our’ mediated public life – various practical dispositions of action towards the misfortunes of migrants and refugees at Europe’s border. On the basis of empirical material from European news (June-December 2015), we construct a typology of visibilities of the ‘crisis’, each of which situates refugees within a different regime of visibility and claim to action: i) visibility as biological life, associated with monitorial action; ii) visibility as empathy associated with charitable action; iii) visibility as threat, associated with state security; iv) visibility as hospitality, associated with political activism; and v) visibility as self-reflexivity, associated with a post-humanitarian engagement with people like ‘us’. In conclusion, we argue that, important as these five categories of visibility are in introdu...
The Visual Framing of Romanian Migrants in the National Press: A Social Semiotic Approach
This paper discusses the role news images play in framing Romanian immigrants to the UK and how they construct the social issue of migration, in the context of freedom of movement for workers in Great Britain. In doing so, it focuses on the stereotypes about Romanians embedded in visuals published in national newspapers and on framing devices as semiotic resources. Using a qualitative and social semiotic approach, based on Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996/2006) framework, this article analyses 101 press photographs and captions from the digital editions of three Romanian newspapers (Adevărul, Gândul and Jurnalul Național), published during January 2013 – March 2014. By regarding the visuals as independently organized and structured messages, the analysis considers their positioning on the web page as well as their modes of representation, interaction, and composition (framing). The results show that the Romanian media reinforce especially the categorization of Roma people and three dominant visual frames emerge: the public security, economic and employment frames. The Romanian press is conflicted about its own national representation, dismissing the stereotypes about migrants only after having fully imported the frames from the British press. Résumé Cet article aborde le rôle de les nouvelles photos dans les cadrages médiatiques de les roumains migrer au Royaume-Uni et la construction de l'immigration comme une probléme sociale, considerér le contexte de la libre circulations des travailleurs dans le Grande Bretagne. La discussion se concentrera aux les stéréotypes sur les roumains dans les images diffusées par la presse quotidienne nationale roumain et le cadre-dispositif comme ressource sémiotique. Méthodologiquement, sera employé une recherche qualitative et une approche sémiotique sociale basée sur le modèl proposé par Kress et van Leeuwen (1996/2006), pour analyser 101 photographies de presse et leur légendes, publié en Janvier 2013 – Mars 2014 dans les éditions digitales des trois journaux roumaines (Adevărul, Gândul et Jurnalul Național). Ainsi, considérer les visuelles organisés indépendant et comme messages structurés, l'analyse se concentrera au le positionnement de site web et aux les modes de représentation, interaction et composition (cadres). Les résultats démontre que les média en Roumanie renforce la catégorization des Roms et trois cadrages visuelles dominantes émerge: les cadrages de la sécurité publique, de l'économie et du travail. La presse roumaine est confuse de sa représentation nationale, rejeter les stéréotypes sur les migrantes depuis importer les cadrages médiatiaques de la presse bretonne.
Journalism Practice, 2021
Greece, Italy, and Spain are the Southern European borders and the main entrances for migrants and refugees to Europe, a movement that was particularly visible after the 2015 "refugee crisis of the Mediterranean." In this context, immigration is used as a political tool, and the object of major media coverage. However, previous studies have shown that this coverage tends to be partial and prejudiced. This study, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, uses the frame building theory to study the perceptions of journalists covering migration issues regarding ways to improve the representation of migrants in the media of these three countries. For that, in-depth interviews were conducted with 94 Greek, Italian, and Spanish journalists. The precarity of the profession, the focus on conflictive approaches, and discrimination based on national origin or religion are mentioned as the biggest challenges. Professionals covering this information demand more individualized and deeper coverage, giving the migrants' condition greater visibility, and giving voice to the migrants themselves, as they are the protagonists of the stories. Greater attention to journalistic ethics and the defense of vulnerable groups is considered essential to achieve this.