Romaphobia in Romanian press: The Lifting of Work restrictions for the Romanian migrants in the European Union (original) (raw)
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Discourse & Communication, 2020
The lifting of work restrictions for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens in the EU, in January 2014, encountered much resistance both in European political discourse and the media, as these migrants became demonised and presented as social and economic threats. In this article, we show how the Romanian press dealt with such discriminatory discourses against the Romanian migrants. We conduct a thorough Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) of news items published in Romanian press, prior to the lifting of work restrictions, and we argue that the Roma emerged as the perfect scapegoats that could explain the deviant and unruly behaviours ascribed by some western media to ‘Romanians’. We also show how racism toward the Roma, referred here as Romaphobia, invokes non-racial practices and instead builds on a reverse victimhood narrative. Such discourses relate in a broader sense to well-established discursive practices in Romanian context but also to the political climate across Europe...
Discourse & Communication, 2018
In this article, we carry out a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) of a sample from a larger corpus of Romanian news articles that covered the controversial camp evictions and repatriation of Romanian Roma migrants from France that began in 2010 and continue to the time of writing in 2017. These French government policies have been highly criticized both within France and by international political and aid organizations. However, the analysis shows how these brutal, anti-humanitarian events became recontextualized in the Romanian Press to represent the French government’s actions as peaceful and consensual. In addition, the demonization of the Roma in the press serves as a strategy to continuously disassociate them from their Romanian counterparts. While there is a long history of discrimination against the Roma in Romania, these particular recontextualizations can be understood in the context of the Romanian government’s need to gloss over its failure to comply with the ...
Roma, Romanian, European: A Media Framed Battle over Identity
The enlargement of the European Union towards Central and Eastern Europe, the profound transformations throughout the EU member-states, old and new, and the recent financial and economic crisis have led to a resurgence of discrimination and new racism, affecting in particular migrants. The paper looks at the reactions occasioned in the Romanian public space by the Italian and French measures against Romani immigrants, among whom there is a large number of Romanian Roma. It employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodology (argumentation schemes, intertextuality) to explore a press campaign targeted at policy change for the purpose of preventing the ethnonym-based confusion between 'Roma' and 'Romanian'. The media articles are significant on two levels: the role of the media in policy deliberations and the dynamic and strategic construal of collective identities. The findings indicate, first, that the arguments put forward by the newspaper are not rationally persuasive and, second, that the discursive configuration of collective identities gives prominence to a nationalist discourse of Romanian (national) identity. At the same time, a disempowered view of the 'Gypsy' ethno-cultural identity is highlighted, oscillating between negative stereotypes and positive, romanticised ones.
Ethnicities , 2020
Research shows that news media around the world tend to represent ethnic minorities in ways which nurture distorted views and invite negative attitudes. Scholars have also emphasised that, in contemporary societies, a political climate has emerged which has made overt racism unacceptable and social taboos leading to racist statements are increasingly being managed and disguised in order to avoid direct accusations. In this paper we use Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to carry out an in-depth analysis of a Romanian television news report-selected from a larger corpus-which addressed the situation of the Roma migrants in Norway. We show how this medium, with editing techniques, voice-overs, sound effects and captions, has its own subtleties for communicating racism in ways that are less obvious at a casual viewing. The case we analyse reports on a Norwegian/EU project to build a factory in Romania, so that Roma migrants can return home to work rather than live and beg on the streets of Oslo.
This study addresses the post-revolutionary history of Roma in the Romanian public sphere by examining the social construction of this minority in press and history textbooks. The objective is to illuminate synchronic and diachronic structural patterns in public texts debating Roma in order to offer a deeper understanding of the Romanian xenophobia assuming that the public debate affects the status quo of Roma. Public texts represent fruitful channels of communication through which selective social realities par excellence, stocks of knowledge and typifications are proclaimed by different societal actors. The press possess a critical function whilst history textbooks a manipulative function advocating normative historical realties par excellence. The modi operandi utilized are quantitative, qualitative content- and critical discourse analysis, which are applied in the monitoring of approximately 6000 newspapers, 197 articles (1991-2012) and 6 textbooks (2008-2014). The results indicate that the media history of Roma resembled police investigations rather than conventional journalism. Manifest and latent stereotypifications have synchronically and diachronically formed uncritical and demonizing stocks of knowledge expressing societal truths that sustained the othering of Roma in press and were depicted as a force behind the destruction of [“our”] national self-image. History textbooks have offered an inexistent stock of historical knowledge omitting, e.g. the slavery and deportations of Roma but highlighting ethnocentric perspectives, patriotism and other minorities.
Romaphobia in the UK Right-Wing Press: racist and populist discourse during the Brexit referendum
Social Semiotics , 2023
This article investigates contemporary expressions of racism toward Roma in the context of growing populism in the UK. We focus on how and why Romaphobia becomes widespread in times of socio-political crises, especially during the 2016 referendum when the UK voted to leave the European Union. Drawing on content analysis and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we provide an in-depth account of how Roma migrants have been represented in two British newspapers during the 2016 so-called “Brexit” Referendum campaign and subsequent vote. The textual and visual analysis demonstrates how racist tropes about Roma identity and culture are embedded into populist rhetoric, often taking subtle forms of expression, yet simultaneously manage to avoid accusations of racism. We argue that the scapegoating and demonisation of Roma migrants in the media contributed to shaping negative attitudes towards Eastern European immigrants and by proxy, to the EU. This plays out in a context of rising nativism and populism where Roma communities come to embody the perceived ills of the European integration project and are regarded as a threat to the fabric of the British nation. We draw attention to the danger of these representations which condemn an already vulnerable community to further socio-economic exclusion.
Press discourses on Roma in the UK, Finland and Hungary
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2017
This article analyses the political and media discourses on Roma in Hungary, Finland and the UK, in relation to both the local Roma in these countries as well as those who migrated from and to these countries following the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. To do so the authors have analysed left of centre and right of centre major newspapers in these three countries, focusing on specific case studies which were foci of public debates during the last two decades. In addition they examined a common case study in 2013 ('Blond Maria') that was discussed throughout Europe. The article examines the constructions of Roma, both local and migrant, in each newspaper and how these have changed over the period studied in this research. The conclusion of the article examines the multilayered processes of social and political borderings which dominate discourses on Roma, 'indigenous' and migrant, and the extent to which they constitute a coherent 'European' construction of 'the Roma'.
International Journal of Roma Studies, 2022
Research shows that the public image of Roma on television reinforces existing prejudice and stereotypes in relation to illiteracy, criminality, primitiveness, or refusal to comply with societal norms and values. Scholars have drawn attention to the various forms of racism, both overt and covert, we find in media and political discourse. Yet, one aspect that is less explored is the role of humour and ridicule in communicating anti-Roma racism. In this article, I conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of two news clips aired by one of the leading audiovisual stations in Romania. I draw attention to the use of humour and ridicule on public television as discursive strategies to belittle or conceal anti-Roma racism. I argue that such representations-where buffoonery, bad taste, cultural incompetence, and arrogance are highlighted-go beyond simple entertainment and cheap laughs but reinforce the inferior and marginalised status that Romani people have held for centuries on Romanian territories.