The 2015 refugee crisis, uncertainty and the media: Representations of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in Austrian and French media
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Anita Gottlob
Abstract
Media coverage of migration and migrants can exert considerable influence on the public’s understanding of and attitudes towards migration. During the peak of what has been called ‘the refugee crisis’ in 2015, heated discussions about immigration and its possible impact filled the media landscape. This study focuses specifically on the news framing of insecurities regarding immigration, exploring what we have termed ‘uncertainty frames’ in the coverage of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. This study will thus lend empirical support to a novel attempt to combine the concepts of uncertainty, risk, and framing. These frames were analyzed within French and Austrian media from 2015 to 2016. Drawing on a content analysis of tabloid and broadsheet articles, different types of uncertainty frames (economy, values, society, etc.) as well as different types of solution frames (the kind of solutions provided for the issue of immigration) were examined. Results suggest that even though all frames decrease in salience over time, important variations in different types of uncertainty frames do appear. It is argued that frames related to abstract issues seem to stay more salient throughout time in both countries.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelseiten
- Focus on Media Policy and Strategic Communication
- Social bureaucracy? The integration of social media into government communication
- Data-driven campaigns in public sensemaking: Discursive positions, contextualization, and maneuvers in American, British, and German debates around computational politics
- Public discourse, political legitimacy, and collective identity: Cases from Iraq, Brazil and China
- The effects of five public information campaigns: The role of interpersonal communication
- Focus on Audiences
- Sensitizing the concept of mediatization for the study of social movements
- Upset with the refugee policy: Exploring the relations between policy malaise, media use, trust in news media, and issue fatigue
- Information-sharing practices on Facebook during the 2017 French presidential campaign: An “unreliable information bubble” within the extreme right
- Pathways to political (dis-)engagement: motivations behind social media use and the role of incidental and intentional exposure modes in adolescents’ political engagement
- Does fake news lead to more engaging effects on social media? Evidence from Romania
- Focus on Media Content
- Reconsidering churnalism: How news factors in corporate press releases influence how journalists treat these press releases after initial selection
- Clouded reality: News representations of culturally close and distant ethnic outgroups
- The construction of the Arab-Islamic issue in foreign news: Spanish newspaper coverage of the Egyptian revolution
- The world’s first mainly female cabinet: “The council of female ministers” in the Spanish cabinet (2018) on Twitter
- From Wanderers to Strangers. The shifting space of Scandinavian immigration debate 1970–2016
- The 2015 refugee crisis, uncertainty and the media: Representations of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in Austrian and French media
- Austerity and fragmentation: Dynamics of Europeanization of media discourses in Greece and Italy
- “As quiet as a mouse”: Media use in Azerbaijan