Local Narrative-Making on Refugees: How the Interaction Between Journalists and Policy Networks Shapes the Media Frames

Abstract

City narratives are crucial in shaping public attitudes and perceptions, and in defining the viable policy options and cities’ responses to hot issues, such as migration and asylum. Nevertheless, the literature on relations between media and political actors is scarce and often unable to account for the complex local mechanisms leading to the production of media frames. This chapter investigates two urban crises: the rapid increase of transit refugees at the Central Station of Milan, and refugees’ illegal occupation of four buildings in the ex-MOI area (former Olympic village) in Turin. Both events started in 2013 and have been studied from their beginnings up to mid-2016 by using qualitative techniques and media frame analysis. By matching the media and policy analysis, the authors show the central role that the local institutions can play in shaping media narratives on migrants and how the cohesion of the policy networks strengthens their ability to affect the local media frames. The dynamics of local journalism also matter: the presence of reporters with specific expertise, a commitment to migration and stable engagement in the issue, as well as collaboration within and between newsrooms, namely the existence of a sort of local media community, contribute to the development of consistent narratives over time and the prevalence of humanitarian rather than security frames.

Looking Into Policy Change: How the Italian Asylum Regime Came of Age

“…This plan turned out to be a big failure. The majority of people hosted there were still homeless and jobless when, at the end of ENA in March 2013, they were abruptly expelled from those facilities so that some of them illegally occupied empty buildings (Marchetti, 2012;Ponzo et al, 2022;Pogliano & Ponzo, 2019).…”

“…A case in point is that of over 80,000 Syrians and Eritreans stopping a few days in Milan to organise their journeys towards other countries. Almost none of them got fingerprinted and since October 2013 the Ministry of the Interior provided economic support to the Municipality of Milan through the local Prefecture in order to establish reception facilities to host transit refugees, while first-aid and information on journeys were provided at the Central Station (Pogliano & Ponzo, 2019). However, this practice became increasingly hard to implement and stopped in 2016, as we will see in the next section.…”