Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies - Volume 7, Issue 1, 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.

Social and digital media have enabled an unprecedented number and variety of photographs of refugees and forced migrants to circulate globally in recent years. Among them are shocking, even horrific images. The shock I present for consideration is associated with the technology of photography more so than the picture’s content. In this article, I claim that the invisible shock of misery photographs of refugees is related to the insidious and unresolved ongoing history of mass population movements and their visual representations. I contend there is an imperative to considering this invisible shock as it leads to foregrounding the miseries of refugeedom and to the patterns of its manufacture. Indeed, any photograph of refugee or migrant misery refers to the truth of discrimination, disparity and the willingness on the part of some humans to treat other humans as inferior. I conclude that this approach presents an opportunity to reconsider uses of photography for social change.

Shifts in the visual coverage of refugees arriving in Europe and prominent compassion fatigue emphasize the need to examine visual strategies utilized to report on the crisis. This study focuses on representations of refugee children using a case of the World Press Photo (WPP) 2016. The material was interpreted with a model for visual rhetorical interpretation of journalistic photographs. Findings indicate the main visual elements involved in representing refugee children: visual trope of the migrant father, relation between children and barriers, visual oxymoron (juxtaposition of contradictory elements) and atmosphere in photographs. Findings suggest that photographs address polemics specific to the European refugee crisis. Specifically, we found that showing children in photographs can elicit compassion for children as well as accompanying (male) adults, legitimize the act of crossing borders, and define the ‘crisis’ as the situation and not as the refugees themselves.

This article investigates the photographic coverage of the migration crisis in Belgium. It focuses on an event that captured the attention of the Belgian media in September 2015. At the end of the summer, hundreds of Syrian and Iraqi refugees, waiting for a hypothetical asylum in Belgium, suddenly set up a camp in the middle of the Maximilian Park, which is located in the heart of Brussels, near the Immigration Office. Up to 1000 people slept there until the camp was dismantled in early October. These events generated a wave of citizen solidarity and constant political agitation over regularization of the refugees. Technical, thematic and contextual analysis of the photographic coverage of the Maximilian Park in four Belgian newspapers (two ‘popular’ titles and two ‘quality papers’) helps not just to understand how what happened there is to be distinguished from other pictures and stereotypes of refugees, but also how these images express and feed longer crisis narratives at both Belgian and European levels. We observed that the photo coverage of the quality newspapers focused on the refugees and the living conditions in the park (while the tabloid newspapers largely ignored them). Instead of showing the refugees as a threat or as distant foreigners facing a new interlocutor (the volunteers of the park), those pictures chose to get as close as possible to the refugees’ daily life and their difficult living conditions. In doing so, however, the pictures presented to the readers seemed far from the tendency to universalize ‘the refugee’ and do not question photojournalism as a form of humanism.

In this article we analyse the visual portrayal of Syrian refugees in the Facebook group ‘Humans of New York’ – a citizen journalism site run by a New York-based photographer. Specifically, we use narrative theory and its related method, narrative framing analysis, to examine the visual rhetoric of the European refugee crisis that emerges on this site, and the images that were most popular with the site’s viewers. Our findings indicate that while mainstream media images marginalize and dehumanize refugees by portraying them as pollutants and terrorists, alternate sites such as HONY do not function under traditional journalistic norms and routines, and provide alternate portrayals. The three narrative frames that emerge are as follows: refugees are skilled, normalized and are ideologically American. The overall narrative is a social master analogue that indicates that refugees are capable of assimilating into American life.

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).

In social, economic and political terms, Turkey is playing a key role in the Syrian refugee crisis. The number of refugees crossing its border is now in the millions, which makes Turkey conspicuous as both a destination and a transit country. The social adaptation process is an important component of the refugee crises given that Syrian migrants are not temporary but permanent. Since Turkey has the largest number of refugees compared to any other (western) country, it is important to understand how Syrian refugees are perceived by Turkish citizens. By taking the significant influence of media on the integration process into account, the main purpose of this article was to document how Syrian refugees are represented in the media. To achieve the aim, 1,054 news articles published in the summer of 2015 by Turkey’s three largest active news agencies were examined by conducting content analysis. We evaluated temporal milestones and spatial importance in Turkish pattern of reporting refugee-related news and compared the positions of the news agencies. Our findings highlight three issues. Based on the major three codes (refugee policy, illegal crossings, refugee as victim) it is obvious that Syrian refugees in Turkish media are represented as victims struggling to survive. While integration and migration policies are an important part of the solution for the Syrian migration crisis, these topics are the three most reported in the news. Last, but not least, the big chunk of news about humanitarian aid proves that Syrian refugees are evaluated by media in human terms.

This study investigated the relationship between news coverage of immigrants and refugees and identifiability of stories’ authors. Quantitative content analysis was used in comparative approach across regions that constitute borderlands between first world and developing countries: the state of Arizona in the United States of America and Italy in the European Union. The content of 800 news stories and 1470 online comments published by four major newspapers in Arizona and Italy in 2013 was examined. The data suggest that in the Italian news outlets, which produced equal shares of ‘anonymous’ and ‘signed’ stories, articles that carried no byline – i.e., whose author was identifiable neither as a journalist nor as a wire service – tended to portray immigrants and refugees more negatively than stories carrying a byline did. No statistically significant relationship was found between representations of immigrants and byline in the sample of stories published by the pair of Arizona dailies. The degree of antipathy for migrants expressed in online comments varied in relation to story byline only in the subsample of online comments posted by readers of the US newspapers.

This article examines the challenges for BBC journalists covering the migration ‘crisis’, particularly the events in Syria that contribute to that movement. Findings from interviews and newsroom observations highlight the emotional risks to journalists when working with user-generated content (UGC), the strategies used to process this material and editorial decision-making employed when determining how best to depict news events. Complex frameworks within BBC News may result in different practices and decisions being made across the newsroom. Editors consider the impact on, and needs of, audiences as routine. But they must also consider the well-being of the staff who may encounter UGC that will never leave the newsroom due to its explicit nature. These journalists risk experiencing trauma and upset, which may also be triggered by the crisis itself over a sustained period. This article raises questions about the best ways for UGC to cover the migration crisis while considering journalists’ experiences and well-being.

This article retraces a conversation with Nicolae Schiau – a radio journalist at RTS (the French-speaking Swiss national radio and television broadcaster) – and the face behind Exils. This ‘augmented’ reportage followed the journey of six young migrants from the Syrian border to Germany and France. The two editors of this special issue interviewed Schiau to question him about his practice as a paradigmatic example of important shifts in crisis-reporting, in terms of format, relationship with the audience and sources as well as personal experience (as a journalist and human being). By using innovative forms of immersive journalism and storytelling, Exils therefore illustrates how combining mobile journalism and traditional reporting practices can meaningfully increase visibility in the media of people previously voiceless, and can potentially provide alternative perspectives on an event by reaching a wider audience, who might not be initially concerned by the situation.