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To what extent does the language used by the media play a significant role in Europe’s Refugee Crisis? Angus Muir Independent Learning Project

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Page 1: ILP Essay Final

To what extent does the language used by the media play a significant role in Europe’s Refugee Crisis?

Angus Muir

Independent Learning Project

Page 2: ILP Essay Final

To what extent does the language used by the media play a significant role in Europe’s Refugee Crisis?

Table of contents

Introduction 3General overview of language 4Refugee vs. Migrant 5Right vs. Left 6The turning point 8Media impact on refugees 11Conclusion 12References 13

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Introduction

Migration is part of the human condition. Ever since humankind emerged out of East Africa, it has been on the move – searching for a better climate, looking for supplies of food and water, finding security and safety. The stream of refugees fleeing the war in Syria has been one of this year’s defining and most complicated news stories, with television screens and newspapers filled with stories about the appalling loss of life and suffering of thousands of people escaping conflict. As the conflict escalated, and the humanitarian disaster with it, creating the biggest refugee crisis in our generation, the appeals for wider media attention, with some notable exceptions, fell on deaf ears with an apparent lack of interest on the part of the vast majority of television and radio companies and major newspapers.

For decades the issue of immigration has been a toxic and divisive political issue in the United Kingdom and in 2015, in the wake of the European-wide migration crisis, the debate around asylum and refugees became highly charged, volatile and polemical. The print and broadcast media in the United Kingdom cover only a very narrow range of migration stories, primarily focusing on asylum seekers, refugees, illegal immigrants, and migrant workers. The media use a ‘template’ to frame stories about migration. These frames generally conflate all migration with asylum, make the migrant the victim and the object, and show migration as a problem and a perpetual crisis. This influences policy monitoring and reform as there is a co-operation between the media and policy: politicians, media and academics provide the language for talking about immigration and thus set the agenda and frame the stories. A certain policy focus is transmitted from government to media, and the stories that the media produce are then fed back into policy discourse.

The conclusions from many different parts of the world are remarkably similar: journalism under pressure from a weakening media economy; political bias and opportunism that drives news agenda; the dangers of hate-speech, stereotyping and social exclusion of refugees and migrants. But at the same time there have been inspiring examples of careful, sensitive and ethical journalism that have shown empathy for the victims. In most countries, including the UK, the story has been dominated by two themes – numbers and emotions. Most of the time coverage is politically led with media often following an agenda dominated by loose language and talk of “invasion” and “swarms”. At other moments, the story has been laced with humanity, empathy and a focus on the suffering of those involved. What is unquestionable is that media everywhere

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and the language that they use plays a vital role in bringing the world’s attention to these events.

General overview of language

The importance of language when discussing the current situation in Europe cannot be overstated. There is a long history of use of pernicious, pejorative language to dehumanise people arriving in Europe, and while there are signs that more positive, humane and accurate terminology is being used to describe the crisis, it remains the case that language is being extensively used, many times with specific intent, to stigmatise those crossing borders.

Language is inherently political, and the language used to describe migrants and refugees is politicized. The way we talk about migrants in turn influences the way we deal with them, with sometimes worrying consequences. Language matters because its misuse can incorrectly and unfairly portray groups of people in a negative light. Words such as ‘illegal’ are so loaded, not in the least because they are a façade for a more racist undertone, but also because they criminalise and dehumanise people. When this is used day in and day out, it reaches a level of normality, so people begin to associate undocumented migrants with criminality.

The visual representation of refugees plays an essential, yet neglected, role in forming the stereotype of ‘the refugee’. This stereotype exemplifies how we universalise ‘the refugee’ as a special kind of person and the lack of a voice from refugees within modern media only exaggerates this. Refugees become classified into the status of sub-citizens as they now have no means of articulating a political will or rational argument – they are “seen but not heard”. Furthermore, the lack of voice only enhances the perception of refugees being seen as a ‘threat’. They are viewed as ‘speechless emissaries’ that trespass boarders and attempt to seek protection in other countries, creating the image of the ‘unpredictable stranger’ upon whom we project our fear and anxieties.

As will be discussed in the following section there are varied debates about the use of particular words or phrases. For example, the repeated use of the word “boat people” to describe people using boats to migrate over the Mediterranean or across South East Asian waters presents issues. Daniel Trilling, editor of the New Humanist, said “We don’t call middle-class Europeans who take regular holidays abroad ‘EasyJet people’, or the super-rich of Monaco ‘yacht people…It strikes me as a way, intentional or not, of avoiding discussing the reasons why refugees from Burma, for instance, take those boats

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and why other countries are reluctant to give them asylum.” This demonstrates the important implications that labelling people has.

Refugee vs. Migrant

The distinction between the terms ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ is critical. There is no ‘migrant’ crisis in the Mediterranean, but there is a very large number of refugees fleeing unimaginable misery and danger, and a smaller number of people trying to escape the sort of poverty that drives some to desperation.

The United Nations defines refugees as ‘persons fleeing armed conflict or persecution’. These people are forced to move and states are obliged to provide them with protection under international law. A refugee is someone who is outside their country of their nationality owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. They do not have protection from their own state, and often it’s their own government that is persecuting them. Refugees have a distinct legal status as they’ve been forced to leave their country because their lives are in danger, and thus there is a recognised legal and moral duty to provide international protection.

On the other hand, a migrant refers to someone who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions. They are defined as people who choose to move not because of a direct threat of persecution or death, but mainly to improve their lives by finding work, or in some cases for education, family reunion, or other reasons. Migration encompasses all kinds of movement from people, and can therefore be used to describe a heterogeneous group of individuals including those moving for economic reasons, often referred to as ‘economic migrants’. These economic migrants, unlike refugees, do not necessarily suffer persecution.

The division of these terms into separate categories is therefore necessary. If the media frame those fleeing Syria as migrants, then it follows that the public and politicians are likely to be less inclined to offer their support, financial or otherwise, as they believe that people are moving not out of fear for their lives but rather for better paid work or an easier life. This consequently has a huge impact on the lives of thousands of refugees as the help that they receive varies with each new report dependent on the way that they are portrayed. The prevalence of the term ‘migrant’ in describing the current situation may now

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seem less benign because its use in the current context ‘removes’ the unique legal status given to refugees.

Despite the clear differences, politicians, the public, and most significantly, the media often confuse the terms around migration. The challenge with the terminology is that it can be unspecific – other than refugee and asylum seeker, no terms have clearly defined meaning. However, the terminology is extremely important – not necessarily the words, but how they are used and what connotations they bring. The term migrant is often used in British newspapers and has been used to infer illegal motives, for example the Daily Express last year drew criticism by running the headline ‘Hidden Migrant Millions’ as they revealed the “shocking” number of migrants actually living in the UK.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that while a person moving solely for economic reasons may not currently have a recognised right to enter Europe to seek a job, these individuals possess human rights and must be treated with dignity and not subjected to prolonged detention or ill-treatment for arriving on a territory without pre-authorisation. Yet the significance of the distinction between the terms still stands, and the nature in which the media decide to use these terms can have an important effect on the refugees themselves.

Right vs. Left

For decades the issue of immigration has been a toxic and divisive political issue in the United Kingdom, and with the current European refugee crisis, the debate around asylum and refugees has become highly charged, volatile and polemical.

The British media scene is a complex one at both national and regional levels. The national print media is regularly described in binary terms as consisting of both ‘quality broadsheets’ and ‘tabloids’, and traditionally, these labels have also been correlated with left- and right-wing editorial politics, although these characterizations are no longer entirely accurate with tabloids – the Mirror and the Sun often express views that are diametrically opposed to others like the Mail and the Express. The broadsheet, the Telegraph, leans to the right politically but is nowhere near as conservative as the Mail or Express.

There has been some excellent coverage focusing on the harsh reality of the struggles faced by men and women, traversing Syria then Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and beyond in search of safety in Western Europe, often

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with young children in tow. While publications such as the Guardian and the Independent have, predictably, focused on the human element of this crisis, the right-wing media have in general responded rather differently, focusing on national security. Publications such as the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the Daily Mirror received widespread criticism on social media for their use of dehumanising language when reporting on the refugee crisis. In what was probably the lowest point for British media coverage, the country’s highest circulation tabloid newspaper, the Sun, in April carpeted by the United Nations human rights chief for describing migrants as “cockroaches” in a piece of journalism which he said was reminiscent of anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda. In the midst of global media coverage of the tragic scenes of suffering by hundreds of migrants who drowned off the coast of Italy earlier in the month, Sun columnist Katie Hopkins wrote: “I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care…these migrants are like cockroaches.” This type of language has an enormous impact on how the British public view the refugees fleeing from conflict to seek safety, and when indiscriminate words, such as “cockroaches” are used to describe these people, it subconsciously creates a dangerous image of these people – an image of which people begin to develop as more negative words are used to represent these refugees, which, in turn, brings about the ‘criminal’ portrayal of refugees as is present in today’s society.

The British media has been shown to be particularly aggressive in reporting on the refugee crisis. Last year, researchers at Cardiff University’s Journalism School conducted a study to examine how the crisis was being reported in different European countries. They examined the different types of source used by the press, as well as the use of terminology – ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’, or ‘illegal immigrant’. They also analysed the different themes highlighted in the coverage, whether it be policy debates, humanitarian suffering or potential threats to national security, as well as the range of explanations offered for population flows and discussions of how the crisis could be resolved. The most striking finding of this research is how polarised and aggressive British press reporting was compared to that of other countries. In most countries, newspapers, whether right- or left-wing, tended to report using the same sources. They also featured the same kinds of themes and provided similar explanations and solutions to the crisis.

However, the British press was different. While the Guardian, and to a lesser extent the Daily Mirror, featured a range of humanitarian themes and sources sympathetic to the plight of refugees, the right-wing press consistently endorsed a hardline anti-refugee ‘Fortress Europe’ approach.

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Guardian Telegraph Daily Mail SunDaily Mirror

Migration figures/levels 69.2 71.9 75.8 54.8 50Search and rescue/aid supplies 47.1 42.1 32.3 31 54.2Political response/policy 41.3 29.8 33.9 38.1 33.3Humanitarian (key theme) 16.3 8.8 4.8 0 4.2Humanitarian (elements) 41.3 29.8 16.1 7.1 29.2Threat to welfare/benefits/resources 8.7 15.8 41.9 26.2 4.2Threat to communities/cultural threat 12.5 14 22.6 9.5 12.5

Threat to national security 11.5 7 16.1 11.9 0Health risk for country of destination 1.9 0 4.8 9.5 4.2Migrant criminality 7.7 7 14.5 7.1 4.2

Figure 1: Percentage (%) of articles featuring selected themes in news coverage

The table illustrates the low proportion of articles which featured humanitarian themes, for example with the Sun including only 7.1% of humanitarian elements. This is in contrast to the EU average of 38.3%, and even newspapers like the Guardian where 41.3% included humanitarian elements. The table also demonstrates the high percentage of articles which emphasised the threat that refugees and migrants pose to Britain’s welfare and benefits system, with papers like the Daily Mail including 41.9% of this, in contrast to the Daily Mirror which only included 4.2% of this in articles. The language used in articles focused more on the threats that refugees may bring can have significant effects on how readers of these articles view the current situation, and the contrasts between the right- and left-wing of newspapers can lead to confusion and uncertainty over the crisis – uncertainty which consequently translates into a lack of willingness to fully support refugees in Europe, thus having a huge impact on the lives of these people.

The turning point

The pivotal moment of the crisis came at the beginning of September 2015 when a majority of the front pages on one day were dedicated to the death of three-year-old Syrian refugee, Aylan Kurdi. He was captured lifeless on a beach near the Turkish resort of Bodrum as he and 11 other Syrians drowned attempting to reach Greece. The images are shocking and expose the truth about

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the difficult journey that thousands of refugees have attempted. Within hours, the image portraying a grim-faced policeman carrying the tiny body away had gone viral, becoming the top trending picture on Twitter under the hashtag ‘#KiyiyaVuranInsanlik’ (humanity washed ashore). The use of this language in the hashtag increased the exposure that the images received but on a different media platform being delivered to a different audience, and therefore it caused a significant change in the way the refugees are illustrated.

Yet one of the most important effects of the images being released is the dramatic U-turn it prompted from certain newspapers, notably those which previously warned of the ‘threats’ that refugees brought.

Figure 2: Screenshots of newspaper front pages reporting on the Refugee Crisis

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As the front pages’ show, the distressing photos of Aylan Kurdi sparked a huge change in the language these newspapers used to portray the refugee crisis. This change happened almost overnight, for example the headline shown by the Daily Mail of “Migrants: How many more can we take?” was published on the 28th August, whilst their next headline of “Tiny victim of a human catastrophe” was published only 6 days later, on the 3rd September. The contrast between the words used in these two headlines and the connotations they bring with them is striking. The first headline creates the idea of a lack of control over the situation and is used to generate the thought that the UK is ‘too full’ of migrants and cannot accept anymore, causing people to turn their backs on them and not give them much support; whilst the second headline uses words like “victim” to illustrate the hardships of refugees and the danger that they have in trying to flee their native countries. This headline is much more open to welcoming refugees

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into the UK and therefore creates the need for support. The difference between these two headlines therefore shows how a change in the language used from the media has a significant influence on the attitudes of the public towards refugees and thus, can have a huge impact on how much support they receive, for example, the Guardian reported that a charity that runs independent rescue boats to save refugees at sea said it had seen a 15-fold increase in donations in the 24 hours after the images of Aylan Kurdi were published, demonstrating the importance of language used by the media in the refugee crisis.

Media impact on refugees

Media coverage does not simply mediate public understanding; it also mediates the lived experience of immigrants and their children. Threadgold et al. (2008) found those who seemed most concerned about, and best understood, the UK media’s typical approach toward migration were those who felt it misrepresented them.

The issue was raised consistently in interviews and focus groups with participants from minority ethnic groups even when researchers didn’t ask about media representation. Members of ethnic and religious minority communities and their leaders knew that ‘public opinion’ identified them as “scroungers”, “bogus” and a drain on scarce resources. They also knew they were unwelcome and tended to be associated with acts of crime and terrorism, and were also clearly at risk of actual harassment and attack, believing the media were to blame for this. This has been proven by a study commissioned by the Mayor of London that found that the links between hostile media coverage and harassment or violence towards asylum seekers were clearer when media coverage coincided with local strains on resources like housing and health care.

It is significant that in these studies, minority groups – which sometimes included asylum seekers and refugees – saw the media narrative about asylum seekers and refugees negatively affecting them. In other words, the harmful impact of media representation seems to be made worse by the media’s lack of any distinction between asylum migration and other flows. Thus, the language used by the media can ultimately create negative actions to be taken against refugees if it portrays them as a ‘threat’, whilst it can also have a significant impact on how safe and welcome refugees feel.

Therefore, the media is shown to be a powerful tool in shaping public opinion – besides garnering sympathy for refugees, news coverage also has the

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power, through misrepresentation and propaganda, to stimulate hostility towards refugees. In light of this, refugees’ ability to establish a new identity and integrate in a host society partly hinges on their portrayal in the media.

Conclusion

The media’s choice of words when reporting on asylum seekers has a significant impact on refugee’s identity. As was previously mentioned, the terms ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ have been used interchangeably by some media outlets, blurring the distinction between people who have left their country in search of work and better prospects, and those who flee their homes because their life is in jeopardy. Misrepresenting refugees not only undermines their plight, but it also diminishes their chances of being accepted by society.

The problems of scant and prejudicial coverage of migration issues exist everywhere. Even reporting of migration in the international media – with a few notable exceptions – tends to be overly simplistic. Migrants are described as a threat. There is a tendency, both among many politicians and in sections of the mainstream media, to lump migrants together and present them as a seemingly endless tide of people who will steal jobs, become a burden on the state and ultimately threaten the native way of life. Such reporting is not only wrong; it is also dishonest. Migrants often bring enormous benefits to their adopted countries.

The media need to explain and reinforce a wider understanding that migration is a natural process. No amount of razor wire or no matter how high walls are built, desperate refugees will find a way through – the refugee crisis is not going to go away. The inescapable conclusion is that there has never been a greater need for useful and reliable intelligence on the complexities of migration and for media coverage to be informed, accurate and laced with humanity.

What is clear, however, is the privileged position that the media inhabit and that they have a responsibility to provide clear, and unbiased information to the public. A failure to do so is very serious and can have wide-ranging consequences, impacting on public opinion and therefore our willingness to support those fleeing for their lives - negative portrayal of refugees in the mainstream press exacerbates stigma and hostility, and sensational reports often present asylum seekers as economic opportunists, potential criminals and a threat to national security. The dehumanizing words used by the media has an extreme impact of the lives of refugees, and thus plays a significant role in the current refugee crisis in Europe.

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References

White, A. (2015). Moving Stories – International Review of How Media Cover Migration

Malkki, L. (1995). Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania.

Threadgold, T. (2009). The Media and Migration in the United Kingdom, 1999 to 2009

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/refugee-crisis-media-coverage_us_5615952ce4b0cf9984d850ec

http://uk.makesense.org/2015/11/20/the-role-of-the-media-in-europes-refugee-crisis/

http://publications.europeintheworld.com/europes-refugee-crisis-the-media-and-public-perceptions/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/07/30/why-the-language-we-use-to-talk-about-refugees-matters-so-much/

http://theelders.org/article/refugee-crisis-how-language-contributes-fate-refugees

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/09/03/refugee-crisis-coverage-words-and-meanings-matter_n_8084016.html

http://theconversation.com/uk-press-is-the-most-aggressive-in-reporting-on-europes-migrant-crisis-56083

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/shocking-image-of-drowned-syrian-boy-shows-tragic-plight-of-refugees

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2015/09/cockroaches-campaigns-how-uk-press-u-turned-refugee-crisis

http://epicureandculture.com/refugees-media-impact/

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