Connotative framing of refugees and migrants in Western European media

What is it about?

The migrant and refugee crisis is at the centre of the current context throughout the world, since that the number of people displaced by force does not stop growing, breaking records every year. With this conjuncture, the attitudes of Western citizens towards migration seem to be becoming increasingly hostile, at the same time that anti-immigration policies are growing. For this reason, it is important to know which are the variables that can directly or indirectly affect these attitudes, and one of the most important could be the information coverage. The intention of this doctoral research is to know exactly how refugees and migrants are being represented through frames both in the main news media of Western Europe, and in social media such as Twitter. Having knowledge about that representation and the most commonly used frames, we will try to verify what are the real effects that repeated consumption causes to these specific frameworks, on the attitudes of Western citizens about migration and refuge. What is intended with this doctoral dissertation is to be able to extract knowledge about how a specific treatment of news, events and actors related to the migration crisis can affect, in order to make recommendations based on empirical evidence so that those responsible for media and/or politics can make ethical decisions, or even promote campaigns based on the frames that increase the most supportive or benevolent attitudes toward migration.

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Photo by pixpoetry on Unsplash

Photo by pixpoetry on Unsplash